Update

The game world has entered the stage of high detail levels and texturing.

This means it is slowly progressing through the final phase.

After that we will begin with the main storyline plotting and gameplay mechanics.

Enjoy!

Little gift

Enjoy !

Shader time !

Got some time to make a shader for the various rivers that will cross the environment , enjoy !

The shader support:

• Normal mapping
• Flow of the river based on a 2D vector flowmap
• Shore/shallow/slow flowing water parts have more transparency than the faster flowing parts
• Vertex displacement to form 3D waves

Unexpected post

In this post i wanted to inform that the main job on the surrounding terrain has been finished !

This means that progress has been made on the game environment.

Next stop:

High poly terrain

Game on

Terrain frenzy and terrain system explained

Today i have finished most of the raw terrain sculpting and exported it as a terrain tile system.

And a little more information on how about the terrain system will work in the game.

Basically we have one large terrain splitted into smaller terrain tiles.
These terrain tiles are very important , not only for the terrain system itself but also in the sense of level of detail.

With these a sort of grid forms from those tiles , each tile has different lod levels:

• LOD0 : is the highest lod level it contains the most details (polycount) , texture size and quality
• LOD1 : this level contains the same polycount and details but the texture size and quality is reduced with 3 quarters instead of using 512x512 textures this lod level uses 128x128 this gives more memory bandwith but keeps the same quality of the model in the still rather nearby viewdistance.
• LOD2 : the polycount on this level is radically reduced to a low detail level because this tile will be located at a rather far distance so it doesn't really matter what quality it has the player isn't there. Also the texture quality and size is more reduced to 32x32.
• LOD3 : is basically only for surrounding tiles to hide away any views that might give away the size of the actual ingame terrain and give the player a sense of openess and greatness from the world he is in.

Example of a terrain tile:

So that's it for this post,

For more info about this game and interesting facts keep following this blog !

...and work continues

The last days i have been really busy continuing the work on the terrain.

The main sculpting has been done and now everything is getting imported into 3ds max to create a high poly version of that terrain.

This gives also some benefits:

• 90 degrees real life rockwalls and cliffs
• Properly rotated textures , heightmap tends to do this really wrong by placing the whole texture over the terrain and not projecting it correctly

By using this technique i can also put more detail into my terrain on a very small scale.

That's it for now , more info will soon come !

Day one of development

Today i started to work on the game's most important stuff;

The gameworld

A game's nothing without a fully dynamic gameworld.

This will be the main workobjective for the coming weeks

More updates coming