Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: February 2015

Still lakes…

This is taking much longer than I wanted… Although I’m closer (and just found out I’m doing a lake every 4 cells), it’s still not good enough, the water doesn’t follow enough: The brightest points are the lake spawn points, but the water dies down too fast… I could do more iterations, but this takes […]

Lakes

Working on a lake system, and results are less than optimal… Currently, I’m looking for a suitable place for a lake in the river, and then using a flood-fill algorithm, but something is going terribly wrong on it: So, the lava here shows the places where a “lake” tile is being placed, and the height […]

Playtesting

I had a small kitchen accident and I cut one of my fingers, so I’m having a lot of difficulty coding and writing… So I decided to try something way different: actually playing the game and tweaking weapon parameters… This is actually something I should be doing more often, since it’s such an important part […]

Flatten rivers

This took a bit longer than expected, mainly because I spent a lot of time tweaking the A* parameters to get more natural rivers, but the rivers now are “flat”, they only go down… The way the river akeis created also enables me to do some additional stuff, like making the flow geometry in the […]

And now for something completely different…

In my research into rivers, I’ve found another option that’s yielding interesting results: use pathfinding… Basically, I just identify a source for the river and then try to leave the map area, weighing the results like in pathfinding (for example, better cost for downhill)… The results are much better than the previous system: Then I […]

More water experiments

Today I did a lot more water experiments, trying out different ways to make the rivers… The results weren’t very good… Either I have very short rivers (because the water doesn’t have anywhere to go) or I have flooding (the most common result): I’ve even tried approaching it based on sedimentation and erosion, but the […]

Water courses tests

I’m trying out using a cellular automata in creating the river courses… The results work great to make lakes, but not rivers: Here you can see the iterations of the automata: The problem it seems to be that the current algorithm checks for each grid element if a neighbor has water in it, and if […]

New rivers

Started work on the new river system… The current rivers are just a line lowering the terrain and replacing the voxel material: It has a lot of bugs (floating rivers, but that could be sorted), but it’s impossible to animate (especially because it doesn’t have an actual direction) and it doesn’t actually look like a […]

Bug-fixing

Today it was bug-fixing time… First bug was an old one that was annoying me, even if it was simple to solve: the screen would turn purple on transition between areas… The second bug was the normals on the objects… For imported objects, I’m using the 3ds format (because it was simple and I already […]