Hello everybody,
We are currently working on many different things so we can enter in an early alpha phase for the game soon, with ground fighting and small spaceships building. But more importantly, we just finished the first version of the “Terran” planet type textures, and improved their generation algorithm.
About planet types and the Terran biome
Planets in Untold Universe will have a type, which will determine many things about their characteristics. Some might be welcoming and easy to shape, others will be hard to settle on and to exploit but one should expect to find more valuable resources on them! Of course, the look and feel of each planet type will be different.
The Terran type is the typical Earth like biome. These planets will feature large oceans, grasslands, some mountains and easy to drill terrain. On the other hand, resources will not be very valuable on them. Below is shown what our terrain generation program currently outputs for them:
In a near future, we will try to add lakes and rivers to it and to make better beaches as they seem a bit too short currently.
New textures!
For some time now, we have been showing you screens featuring a Minecraft texture pack called Summerfields. This beautiful pack was used to help us test rendering, but we needed to start producing our own textures. And finally, we now have our first terrain texture pack for the Terran planets!
Of course, this pack is not complete, as many elements may be added to the environment. It currently features sand, dirt, trees, water and different grass textures.
As you can see, grass blocks have four different textures randomly chosen. This randomisation might be applied to many other block kinds, globally reducing the redundancy of the environment.
What’s next?
On the terrain generation part, we are now working on producing other planet types and on improving the Terran one. We would like to be able to generate planets of five or six different types in less than three months.
When it comes to art, things are a bit different. As we are currently implementing gameplay and creating the game backstory, we will focus on producing game concept art so we can start working on players and spaceships textures and models. Other texture packs will come after.
We hope that you will enjoy the Terran planet new look and feel!
See you soon!
I like the concept
i think this seems awesome
Beautiful.
Looks very impressive and the game concept sounds interesting.
However as a engine programmer myself I kept wondering how your engine
handels spherical planets made out of square blocks?
I'm sure you are aware that there are some very hard to solve issues
with this type of objects which is why there usually are some serious
limitations on player actions regarding the planet surface.
For example, can the player run or walk around the the planet? How
deep can the player dig or how tall a building can the player build?
Cheers!
Actually, planets are not spherical. They are planar, and the player will loop on X and Y independently (it's more like a torus). The spherical look is a pure graphic trick ;) It also makes the night shorter on one direction than in the other.
From water level, you can dig 126 blocks down and build 100 blocks up. After this, for gameplay reasons, you wont be able to build in low orbit (from +100 to +300).
In space the planet is a real sphere and you can not interact "directly" with the ground, as you are really far from it. This is where you will be able to build large spaceships and fly them.
I hope this answers your questions ;)
Thank you guys!
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