Blogs - Daxiongmao87

I know I kind of dropped off the face of the Earth for a while, but now having a solid partnership really changes things. It's been almost a year since Cosmicube's development was halted, and now, due to the constant urging and encouragement of my friend we have established a Company and completed the game for the android. It's been quite an intense two months, but it's been fun this time instead of frustrating. With a freshly collected pool of inspiration and motivation I will be spending the next month continuing the world generator project now dubbed Gaiagen.

Gaiagen is a terrain generation system being developed for the Unity game engine. It will allow developers to rapidly craft realistic looking terrain based of the user's desired parameters. Though the engine's script is going to be rewritten, the same idea will be applied with a cleaner code. Here is what I accomplished with the old code, and I'm looking to further develop with the new code:

The purpose of this video was to emphasize the behavior of the terrain, the texturing code is rather primitive, but future versions will posess biome functionality and such. I've also been working on getting multithreading to work, so calculations should be accomplished at a muich faster rate than what the engine is currently rendering. Anyway if you're interested seeing where this project goes, feel free to follow this blog. More to come soon!

The World generator is almost complete. There have been a few finishing touches, mostly related to giving the user more freedom with parameters when creating the world. My next step is to create a system to plot towns semi-logically on the map. What I mean by semi-logically is that civilizations would be climate specific, this would also effect the names of towns. a city or town by the shore can be properly suffixed with "Harbor" or "Oasis" for a desert civilization. These are things I'm looking to complete. I was considering having the town system also generate the road map too, but I think that step can be fulfilled later on.

I just uploaded a new video of my recent progress. Being on the third revision the world generator not only maps the terrain, but also maps the climates. The results are interesting. Take a look!

The next step is to create a system that will generate hamlets, towns, cities, kingdoms, etc. Looks like I have to start researching again!

I haven't had much time in the last few days to work on my project due to work and other challenges life decides to throw at me, but while I'm busy with other things, this project is never far from my mind. I've been doing a lot of research and thinking of how to accomplish procedurally generated deserts, jungles, swamps, etc. In the next update I will be posting images of my progress so far, now that I'm back.

I don't know about you, but a confirmation window would be nice just in case you accidentally press the "delete blog entry" button rather than the "create blod entry" button. I'm not sure quite how that happened, but the last post was deleted!

Before I recap on the previous post I realized that have yet to share with you the whole idea, the big picture, of this project that I'm currently undertaking. I think it's now time to share with you that idea. So, it's always been a dream of mine to create my own Massive Multiplayer Online RPG ever since I first dived into programming at the age of 13 (thanks to Mark Overmars for GameMaker!). But... no matter how many great ideas I came up with there was always one major obstacle keeping me from making these ideas into reality: manpower.

As my brain constantly thinks about innovative game ideas it came to me. What if there was an MMORPG where a player could essentially "create" their world and have people explore it? Now by create I mean have the server generate a world randomly based on parameters that player sets. This seems a little more realistic to me as the contents of these worlds are not made by hand like other MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest. The content are generated by algorithms with parameters set by players. Do I want a big world? A small world? A desert planet? Or maybe an island world? Should it be cold? or maybe hot? What kind of technology do I want in mine? Modern? Medieval? Maybe futuristic! Now, what about monsters? What races do i want? What classes? What if I want to create my own class? Do I even want magic in this world? etc.. etc.. Then, at the push of a button that world is generated! Other parameters the player could also enter are the names of the world, perhaps deities involved, what kind of influence they have, and so on.

There are a lot more ideas that I don't feel are appropriate for sharing this early in development, but there will be more!

Anyway, progress! I was not happy with the way the old generation system played out, it was clunky and it just didn't look good. So I've decided to start over. You probably noticed some new pictures or videos, and I hope you enjoyed them. Progress has been coming along nicely, despite the fact that these algorithms give me headaches.

Some of these procedural generation algorithms seem very simple until an amateur programmer like me tries to implement them into code then manipulate that code to present a product of that algorithm! Its a not a bad thing, though, it feels like a sort of accomplishment when you actually figure it out and get it working!

Anyway enough about that. There has been quite a bit of progress in the last few days. In the video you can see that there was procedural texturing going on. Well, I sort of cheated in that video, as I used a pre-existing asset in unity to do the job for me. BUT... I did end up writing my own procedural texturing script since that asset had more than what I needed and now the project is produced 100% by me... so far!

Another thing that I've completed working on for the most part is the "step 2" of the world generator (step 1 was fleshing out a low-res version of the whole "world" as seen in the videos). Step 2 involves taking each section of that low poly map and generating a 1km by 1km high-poly map that is more detailed. Curious to know what potential sizes this produces? Well the maps rendered on the video are 128km by 128km, which is 16.384 square km!! Now I know that's nothing compared to the size of the earth, but that's just an example.

My dilema, though, is whether or not to have the generator generate the whole world at the start, or have the world generated as the players explore. The former allows for easier development on my part, and the latter allows for much larger areas to explore (potentially multiple times the size of Earth). But do we really need that big of a world? That question I leave up to you.

At about 8 hours a day on this project there has been some good progress. Procedural generation can be rather frustration; specially when its the first time you've experienced with it. As of now I have a very much working basic procedural terrain generator that seamlessly generates as you move. My goal was to script it in such a way where there would be no loading. Having reached this goal I'm going to call it a rest for today. I will upload a video of what I currently have when I wake up!

After a night of insomnia I decided to make myself useful. So I took the initiative. Here I am, a one man team with a mind overflowing with ideas. I'm currently working on an oen of these ideas, and it involves the big acronym, "MMORPG" and a historical technique known as procedural generation. If you're not familiar with the latter, its simply creating content using algorithms. This should make my work a little easier, since one person creating a whole world of content for an MMORPG would be unrealistic. This will be a . . . little less unrealistic. Hopefully as I progress I will be able to update this blog with screenshots and videos. Since I'm running purely on passion and none on financial goals, if you find this development to be interesting, let me know! Your interest and feedback will help me see the end, no matter how long the trek! And now, for the first screenshot, the newborn prototype:

Minecraft tiles are only placeholders!