Building the world

Alright, I've been quiet on the blog recently. That's because I mean to have a big change on the game. The change is about level building. Holocene is a Real Time Strategy game and those games should be replayable, but that only works is the playing field is more interesting than just a flat plane and if it's different every time you play the game.

For that reason, I studied procedural level generation for a couple of days. It works by putting a plane in the scene and having vertices inside of it go up and down according to some noise thingy that I do not yet totally understand. The idea is to get the plane to resemble a sort of low poly terrain.

Next, there'll need to be some changes in the different scripts to allow for the third dimension that we have now. In fact, Holocene may look like a 3D game already, but it's the famous thing with the ant that quantum physicists always say when they explain the multidimensional world they think of. An ant is walking on the pavement like its 2D. There is no up or down for it. Well, the objects in Holocene should turn from ant to human.

I'm starting to get the gist of the level creation and I think I might be able to use the same script with some modifications once I build a campaign mode, but right now, I am not yet satisfied with the way the terrain looks. It's too bumpy and not mountainous enough. It's too all-the-same to my taste and I'll need to change that, because we need valleys and mountains, not just one 6 meter high hill following another.

I need to get the noise changed. While there's the Perlin Noise, I need to tweak that. I need lower the frequency so that we don't get hills everywhere we could get. We're trying to run a civilisation there, right? Next, we need higher amplitudes, because we need mountains and valleys. Lastly, I need to add more noise within the noise so that it does not look the same everywhere we look. We need hilly parts, flat parts, sea and mountains. And everything in between.

Looking at the code I have now, that must be feasible.