Hello everyone,
last week we asked you if we should split the environment update so we can get new bigger map with biomes out the door and released early. The overwhelming majority was for splitting the update, so we're focusing on finishing the new map features.
Terrain Programming
The most important piece of work was making the game actually playble in the new map. For now, we have been doing a lot of world generation work, but to make the game playable, we needed to look at lot of integration work: The new terrain shader needed to work with the decals and the visualizations, we needed to adapt the road + car rendering system, the game scene load order had to change a little, the space scene needed to be fixed, and so on. Basically many of the small features that use the map in some way needed to be made to work.
Our programmer Sepehr on the other hand was caught up in handling visa documents, but saving/loading is probably almost done for the laser feature.
Grass
Finally we ran into some grass rendering issues: It was difficult to achieve the density we wanted without making the grass huge in comparison to the buildings.
We tried a couple of differnet approaches, like making grass with horizontal planes:
This approach yielded very dense grass and was good for performance, but didn't look as good. Since players can control grass performance anyway, we opted for a different technique, seen here:
(The difference to grass screenshots in previous posts: The previous ones were art tests, here we make sure they also work with many of the technical requirements.)
Happy playing