Welcome to this weeks Skywatch! Today, we want to give you a look at our UGC tool - the Island Creator. This post features a lot of technical insight and dev speak, since the Island Creation tool is quite complex, but the result is ultimately beautiful and unique islands for our players to explore!
Our Island Creator will let players create their own content, in the form of floating islands. It's an extremely powerful tool, that's essentially a 3D geometry sculpting program, which will let you build your own islands from scratch! It's the same tool that our own developers use to create islands to populate our game world with.
Working off of a base of the Worlds Adrift Island Creator, we're updating the tool for Lost Skies, with a host of new features and assets. In the video clips below, you can see some of the work that's been done on the Island Creator UX, as well as a couple of features that are being updated to speed up the island creation process: selection filtering and ghost objects.
Selection filtering allows you to filter specific assets for placement/editing and includes lockable assets to allow an easier way to work on or replace certain asset groups. This is mostly useful for us internally as we update old Worlds Adrift islands for use in Lost Skies, since we require faster selection of older assets to replace with newer ones. It will also be useful for our community Island Creators too though, as it will speed up bulk asset editing.
The ghost object feature allows you to clip assets inside of each other/inside geometry to achieve your desired aesthetic.
The features shown above required updating, owing to us moving to Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). For example, the old Worlds Adrift Island Creator had similar ghosting behaviour to what's shown above, but it no longer worked correctly for Lost Skies following the switch to HDRP, so the entire system needed to be updated. The ghosting feature is an asset preview which can show you what would be placed, but also what would potentially not be visible during gameplay - the clipping. The section at the end of the ghost object video shows the system as a whole and it's flexibility.
Moving assets onto the GhostObject layer means they work with this system, making it quite flexible and easy to maintain.