Trying a different way

So the magic phrase is "procedural level generation". I opened a whole can of worms when I told myself that Holocene needed a ground that would be different from a flat plane. It got me into a whole range of tutorials for making something that looked exactly like I needed, but really wasn't.

I learned to work with Perlin noise maps  and how to use those to get a 2D configuration that looks random enough for my purpose. That's nice and it's also nice to use plane objects of home made meshes to get the level rolling,  but probably not in Holocene,  because I could not get the navmesh working. And by now you should know that this is a no-go.

The problem is that, no matter how hard I try, navmeshes end up below the surface of the level and not on top. That means that the characters would not be able to walk over the surface of the world in the way that I planned. I couldn't get it to work.

Yesterday I found another tutorial on putting what I learned to practise on an actual terrain mesh and that works if I use the special navmesh scripts that I found on the Unity github. The scripts allowed for baking the stuff at runtime which seems to work. All I need to do now is bake the mesh after generation.

I have a working navmesh now and I can now add the features to it. I am still not completely satisfied with the way the terrain looks. I think I need to tweak the noise script to allow for more flat regions, but for now it works. Next is to turn this into a game.