Welcome back!
Not many people looked at the last devblog, but if you are reading this, you likely read the previous one. Doesn't really matter, I like not having much attention because it allows me to do various changes without worrying about community impact. Though it can hurt because I don't have an external voice telling me if something I am doing is wrong. Anyways! Updates!
Failed gun demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs4HE73AaVA
I tried making some sort of video for the steam page. Sadly, after editing I noticed the cursor was in the middle of the screen, meaning I have to remake it. I am fine putting it here, but there was no way I was gonna put that on the steam page. There are also other various errors, such as the bullets in the mag not rendering properly, or how weird the IK on the arms seem to be. I will make a better one sometime this weekend.
Procedural!
I started this game last June in 2021. It started off not the prettiest. Here is the earliest screenshot I have of the generation.
Basically is just spawned one of many natural objects on each vertex of the map mesh. And the map looked like this:
Afterward, I changed up the shaders to give a more toon look, along with that low poly triangle shading, as shown
Then I updated the trees that are placed with an asset pack I had bought, along with adding far more variation to the procedural resources and nature that spawned.
But after polishing with better textures, shaders, new nature, and many new things, it is way better looking!
Without the nature
With it
Grass
As you could see in older pictures, the grass was probably weird-looking. This is because they were objects, and therefore placed like they were a tree, a building, etc. That isn't too efficient. Like this:
So I tried using a geometry shader.
The only issue is that I couldn't control where it was. And then when I could, it was very slow when dense, which if the grass is spare, doesn't look too good. Even when I introduced a draw distance, it still didn't seem to help with the issue. Turns out, the issue was that even though the grass wasn't being rendered, the mesh was still being tessellated, which is the main thing causing issues. With that discovered, now it could run fast!
This scene would've run at 30-60fps, in the editor, without VR turned on. Now in the same conditions, it runs at 500fps!
Procedural Buildings
Before I thought it would've been incredibly hard to place buildings and other various things. But after I changed up the procedural object spawner, it was actually way easier. These were the first two I have made, and more will be made. They will likely be similar to buildings players can build, but they will have features to make them be different.
In the future, I hope to be able to bake some sort of mask to prevent the grass from spawning under buildings.
That is all for now
I think that is all I have to share, for now, there might be more updates as I get into the habit of working more, it just has been hard being a solo developer.