Terrain Tools Update!

Terrain Tools Update!

Hello folks!

I’ve finished coding the improved terrain system and the actions. Now all that’s left is connecting it to the UI!

But first, I’ll give you a preview of what’s coming. First, you have the good old drag to place the decoration:

decor_tool

Select the tree type, drag the tiles and the trees will be placed. Each tile can support up to 4 decoration pieces. Adding anything after that will result in the decorations simply being shuffled around.

If you want to fix it up, I’ve added a trimming tool that currently removes the last placed decoration object from the tile:

prune_the_stuff

Later, I’ll make it so it actually aims at the decoration object you’re aiming at and removes that.

Then, for elevating the terrain, I’ve reworked the previous options to use the vertex directly. For altering the elevation directly, you can either click and drag (for fine-tuning), or simply click and hold (for painting). For each of them, you can choose between 1 vertexes, 4 vertexes (a tile), or 16 vertexes (the tile and the neighbours) as below:

drag_one

drag_two

drag_three

And for painting:

paint_one

paint_two

paint_three

And finally flattening:

flattener

As you may have noticed, the decorations nicely go up and down as the elevation is changed. This is part of the update to the decoration system, which makes it work much better than before.

So that’s what I’ve been working on this week! I’ll finish hooking it all up to the UI tomorrow, and perhaps release an updated version of the demo so you can try it out. And then go back to the AI implementation!

(Ah! Forgot to add: I’ll be turning off the water tile for now as it’ll need a deeper reworking. I’ll just replace it with a regular blue tile so that you can still plan on how the water would feel.)

Dev Update #21: Alternated Triangles

Dev Update #21: Alternated Triangles

Heyo folks!

Today’s update is about to make terrain building more interesting!

If you’ve paid attention so far, you may have realized that the terrain mesh we’ve been using is composed of simple quads, all in the same order, in the same direction and whatnot.

Which is workable, and how most games do it. But I decided to change, influenced by my time playing Transport Tycoon, which used a form of alternating the triangles in the grid to make some more interesting and well connected terrain. So now, the triangle strip looks like below:

tristriping

What does this mean?

It means that, before, each vertex could be connected to 6 other vertices at most:
-Top, Bottom, Left, Right, and two diagonals one on the same direction.

Now, as you can see below, each vertex can connect to up to 8 vertices, one in each Cardinal and InterCardinal directions. This gives you more freedom to shape the terrain in interesting ways, which is great!

A simple experiment with just random heights:

triThings

Once I’m done reintegrating the new terrain, I’ll make a new update with some interesting terrain possibilities!

Stay tuned!