Lake flow
Today I managed to make the flow of water work on the lakes… in the process I also found some bugs with the terrain generation code that I had to fix…
First, without any change to the flow system, this is what I got:
It was a quite neat effect, to be honest… but the rest of the water was just too static, which looked weird…
Then I added code to make the flow map on the rivers flow towards the nearest exit… but it wasn’t working properly, so I had to run this in debug, and since debug mode is so slow (mostly because of the pathfinding algorithm I use to create the rivers), I reduced the number of rivers to one, and that made a bug appear, but it looked cool!
Quite interesting, but completely unplayable… 
Anyway, I fixed that bug and the one with the lake flow and this is the final result:
The water clearly goes to the exit… It still has some circumstances in which it doesn’t work too well, for example when the exit doesn’t have LOS to the place I’m computing the flow… This could be solved with pathfinding, but I think it’s overkill for something merely cosmetic…
So rivers and lakes are almost done… Still need to port the shader to HLSL, add a waterfall effect and make sure that trees don’t spawn near the water on jungle levels…
Now listening to “Antichrist” by “Akercocke”
Rivers and lakes are looking really nice. It got me to wonder, how will they affect gameplay appart from being an accident on the landscape. Will there be any kind of aquatic vehicles? Will there be any vehicles at all? With the apparent size of the map it looks like it would be quite boring walking such a great distance… Just wondering.
Anyways, great job. Excited to see more of it!
Hi there, thanks for the interest!
In terms of gameplay, the water bodies slow down the player and enemies significantly, so fighting in the water is tricky… The water also helps avoid dehydration in areas where the heat is very high.
Unfortunately, the game won’t have vehicles… Doing good vehicles would take about another year or so of development… That’s why I kept the maps relatively small (they’re not as big as they appear), in real terms the game area is about 640m x 640m, so you can travel from one end of the map to the other in about 2 minutes or so, if you don’t stop to shoot anybody! 🙂
Maybe on the sequel! 😀