Terrain generation is undergoing drastic changes. It's like a big construction site which has been dug open and now we need to put the pieces back in. Erik has been making the system node based and Kimmo implemented hydraulic and thermal erosion. The latter allows us to use simple shapes and turn them into realistic end results.
Here's a demonstration of what it does for a simple heightmap sketch:
There's some technical challenges involved which we haven't solved yet:
1. Erosion is a relatively slow algorithm to run on CPU so we might have to do it on GPU. The good part is that it looks very cool while it's happening so a minute or two generation time shouldn't be too bad - and once you've generated the heightmap the world can be saved and loaded really fast.
2. The default draw distance is so near that you wouldn't see much of the nice scenery. In order to increase the draw distance without impacting performance we probably need to use tesselation algorithm for the terrain.
We plan to feed this type of "gameplay map" for the system and the erosion will add all kinds of interesting and chaotic secondary details. This way we can guarantee that the world is in a playable shape and not an entirely chaotic force of nature with everything at Mount Everest height or almost entirely filled with water :)
Final road positions can be calculated with the nearly completed height map so they can be nice serpentine roads in mountain range instead of going straight up.
Maybe some landmarks can be added later in the simulation so they will be less eroded. (recently built roads and villages etc.)
At the same time we've finished several smaller features:
-New enemy, Giant Spider:
-Ability for characters to see in the direction where their heads are pointing at, so it's no longer just cosmetic thing if characters turn their heads. (For example: Enemies might spot you while turning their head)
-Character labels turn red when they go to aggro mode to make it more apparent that somebody is angry.
-Characters tolerate more punishment from their own factions before retaliating.
-Dialogue boxes have a maximum distance where they are visible.
-Player damage feedback animations added.
We're considering doing a smaller update in-between, depends on how long it takes to finish the new terrain generation stuff.
We will keep you updated on how things progress!
-Timo