Mountains and valleys

So. It is taking longer for me to write new articles on this devlog. That is mainly because I am studying ways to improve on the bumpy world that I made in the previous version of Holocene. Right now, I'm working on procedural level generation again and I think it's starting to dawn on me.

In the beginning of this year, I bought a couple of Unity courses on Zenva.com to get me started on this new years resolution that I got myself into.  Now that we're 9 months along the way, I saw quite some of the hours of videos and completed some of the courses.

One of the courses is on procedural level generation.  It uses a Perlin noise to make a height map and move vertices on a grid. Then it has a heat map to make sure stuff at the equator is hotter than around the poles. That is mixed with more noise to have some randomness. Another map brings the moisture and that comes together to create biomes. All very interesting.

I am going to finish the course,  but I am not going to use it straight away,  because I want to improve it.  Firstly, water is just blue land. Making a game about guys walking around the world,  water cannot just be blue land. I know what that is about and I think I can fix that, by having the water a separate object that the navmesh can now cross. I'm not sure how to do this exactly, but I'll manage.

Second thing may be more difficult to do and less important. I don't really like the way the ground is textured, by a colour map. Some parts of the world are "boreal forest" (which is a difficult term for us Dutch right now, by the way) and that's a specific tint of green for the ground. There will be trees and plants later, but I'm not sure green floors per se will be right, and especially not the red deserts that Zenva came up with.

Next, I am not sure if the course will cover this, but I will need more  detailed stuff on the scene to interact with. That'll in itself probably be like trees which will be in the later part of the course, but I don't know yet.

Probably even more important than all the other things combined is preventing the game from taking too much resources generating the world and keeping track of it. I'm planning to have a huge world, kind of like Minecraft. Problem is that the procedural process takes quite some time on a 10 by 10 tiles grid. I know this is mainly because of building a navmesh for the tiles. That should go better later. I hope I can manage that without clogging the PC totally or else I might need to change my scope to smaller levels which would really be a shame.

Whatever will be, first I am going to finish the course and restudy the code because some of it is very poorly explained.  Then I'll tey to find the solutions.