With the end of the year approaching fast we are exited to share our progress on terrain generation. On the previous update you could see how the world map is composed of individual tiles with a given biome, now each of those tiles can be explored to enter into procedural generated terrains.
Terrains, terrains...
But hey, this doesn't look a lot different from previous captures! you may say. So, what's the actual new stuff here?
Right, up until now the terrain used was fixed, almost the same boring blocks on the same positions every time no matter where on the world map you came from. That's no more. Each world map tile now generates terrains based on their biome bringing not only variety but also challenging landscapes to build, fight and explore.
Some realism, some fantasy
Being an rpg full of magic and mythic creatures, terrains have a mostly fantasy setting too but their generation process actually borrows some concepts from real life.
Do you remember those geology classes from school? No? Me neither but it doesn't matter as this is really simple stuff. You know how the earth surface is dividid into layers, like a sandwich, we have the crust, the mantle and the core and each of those is actually made of more layers called strata. Each layer forms and is eroded by different processes giving them a unique look.
By borrowing on these concepts, our terrain generation process defines several layers made of different concentrations of particular blocks, like grass, dirt, lime stone, etc. Each layer then is added to the terrain with either a fixed thickness over the surface (like sedimentary deposits) or a fixed range of heights (as eroded strata on a valley). We finally decorate the base terrain with trees, grass, objects or even caves to give each little part of the world a unique feeling.
Enough with the geology stuff, show me the results!
Here we will present the basic terrain types (biomes) implemented so far. A close up capture followed by a panoramic view of 2 different terrains of the type.
Plains
Mesa
Mountains
Forest
Desert
Next...
With each update we are getting closer and closer to the release of a playable pre-alpha demo. We still need to polish some UI/control implementations and create a handful of skills to be able to offer full combat and terrain access (probably not persistent building yet).
Stay tuned and follow us on the social networks.
