In glorious first person

I plugged a heightmap of the terrain into a voxel engine:

Ignore the sky and ocean, those are drop-in effects to aid the visualization. The terrain shape itself is what matters… and that is terrible.

I still haven’t finished the data storage/serialization work, or how to stream the terrain for multiplayer, but figured those things should be shaped to closely match the requirements of the voxel engine, and the way to learn that is to just try marrying the two. It was harder than I thought it would be.

I also want to unblock actual game work instead of being stuck purely on terrain.

Immediately this visualization makes me realize I’ve given hills and mountains realistic heights while keeping distances down-scaled, leading to mountain ranges looking ridiculous in 3D despite looking fine on a map.

More importantly… that might be the key to why the hydrolic erosion hasn’t been behaving the way I want it to — these ‘rivers’ are cliffs. Perhaps scaling hills and mountains to start with more realistic gentle slopes might fix the problems I’ve been having.

Runevision (Rune Skovbo Johansen) posted a video of the progress in his procedural landscape for “The Big Forest”, and it stunning. “A world you want to live in” is a central pillar of the procedural game I want to make, and runevision has already knocked that one out of the park.