Dynamic terrain in GODOT

Long time no posts.

I haven't been keeping up with the projects I started. At first it seems fun and exciting, but I always run in to limitations in the setup, plus the grind of just making stuff without any real challenges... It ends up being something that I don't want to commit to.

So right now I'm just messing around with some ideas and see what comes out. No commitment to a bigger project, just some time to try new things.

This week I've been working on procedurally generated terrain.

In the past, there were some big limitations on how I approached this, because the game world had to have the whole map, from the micro to the macro. I had to choose a scale somewhere between, which meant I couldn't have really large maps, or really small details.

I think I've found a way around that.

Below you can see two types of map data coexisting on top of each other. The wireframe is the collision data, used for physics and for clicking on the map, to move characters around. The grey plane is the visual representation of the map.

What's important is that they don't have to be the same size.

The two types of data are completely separate from each other. The collision data can be low resolution. It can cover the whole gameworld, or be loaded in chunks.

The visual representation is all done with shaders. It can be rendered super fast, and only needs to be on a plane big enough to fit in the viewport. This means the vertexes can be modified with not only the game world data (heightmap) but also rocks, bumps and hollows, cracks, dunes or whatever else is needed to bring the visual texture of the ground to life. It can be very high res, because it's all done on the GPU, no need to worry about poking verts around.

Hopefully I'll show some experiments on this idea later this week.

Comments

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra

Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

Search This Blog