Italy progress

So for the next map we figured it would be nice to have a transparent development (where possible at least). What this means is we'll throw a bunch of stuff in here as we build the terrain from start to finish so you can see what we're up to every step of the way. You'll see some really early quality stuff that WILL be ugly

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Everything here is a work in progress and in no way reflects the final quality.
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So lets start out with a quick and dirty mock up of the size and (currently) planned shape. The size may change due to technical limitations but at the moment we're looking at a 4 x 4km terrain. We're still discussing whether to go for an island or a coastal portion of the mainland (shown below). This is all still an ongoing process and there's plenty of mock ups already about where to go with the design.



Here's a shot showing the scale in a slightly misleading way that makes it look truly enormous:



Roughly the current layout:



The layout may need some more changes however in order to make the mountains a bit more majestic and to fit in the various areas we want.
--- Post updated ---
Another rough look.



A lot of the map will likely be done using ground cover and I'm thinking of using large high quality mesh rocks placed into the ground to create rocks protruding from it. Previously this wasn't possible due to the flickering but now it works very well based on tests done on utah.

 

Experimenting with the layout some more. This should be able to cover all the types of areas I wanted.

 

Bunch of layout sketches, I'm really tempted to go with an island despite it being less majestic than having a gigantic mountain range off in the distance. I suppose the mainland could be close by.



I really like the idea of an island actually

 

Huge island?

 

Starting on some veggies.



Edit: updated pic, this is the standard way I do billboard vegetation: create object groups and use a particle system and tweak until I get the desired shape, perhaps add in a few manual pieces afterwards. Usually with grass making 2-4 particle systems per clump and rotating gets what I'm after though, here I use 2 for each clump.

 

In the blog I posted this pic:


Here's it fixed and looking actually alright ingame:


It could be the (absolutely awful) placeholders making them look better. This way it's only going to get better though

 

Some more veggies:

 

So this was kind of cool, I was modeling some of the vegetation that I'll later render segments of and use to build up the tree models.



Anyhow ... I duplicated them a couple of times, merged, duplicated a few more times and stuck them into a tree pattern and hit render, result is pretty cool for a placeholder but I've put up a big disclaimer because you absolutely shouldn't expect the final level to look like that

 

The start of the vineyards:

 

Turned out ok:

 

And ingame:

 

Some oak vegetation (basic, will still have some editing done on it later):

 

And some wip pine veg:

 

So I just had an enormous breakthrough in the creation of foliage. Using the normal edit modifier for blender I've changed the way the foliage is shaded somewhat to create more realistic, softer looking vegetation. First time around either the modifier was buggy, the exporter didn't work or I couldn't figure it out but this time everything went perfectly. In the following screens you can see the difference pretty clearly, the old method is on the right, left is using custom vertex normals:









Not only does this look far better but it allows us to create realistically shaped vegetation for once (rather than being limited to making everything shaped like a ball). There's still plenty of room for improvement with shaders and stuff but this was a big roadblock for much of the Italian vegetation.

I also experimented with a 16,000 polygon monstrosity that looks really nice but is probably fairly impractical due to the detail. I'll make a big disclaimer here so nobody claims a downgrade when they actually get to the release version and it doesn't look this good:

Spoiler: GAME WON'T ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE THIS, TOO MANY POLIES

 

Testing out how to build some trees again. On the texture itself I might delete the larger branch too so the smaller ones are higher resolution since I don't need large singular branches anyway. These trees are less than 1,000 polygons each:

 

The oak leaves are probably too big, might need some subtle changes.

 

2k poly using smaller leaves:

 

Some more work on Italy, made the first complete tree with lods and all. I tried a new way this time of starting with less vegetation mesh components but using much more complex ones instead that were created by cutting up simple planes. This way I can create lod versions by collapsing them back to 2-triangle squares very easily. Due to the fact that these trees are fractal in design it means lods can be created much faster than before: I duplicate the base meshes, collapse the complex shapes, duplicate the larger branch objects and link their individual parts to the newly created lod parts and now I have a lod branch, then I duplicate the tree itself and link it to the newly created lod branchs and it's done.





[The middle lod in this picture isn't quite right because I had a layer hidden and some meshes didn't make the export]: