I talked before about the improved noise system. I’ve been playing around and experimenting with different parameters, getting some interesting results. The difference between a real island and my fake video game island is that of scale. I want mountains, sweeping rivers, wildly different biomes, all on one island that spans maybe only 1.5 miles...

I’ve spent some time refactoring the world generation and building a useful world generation editor. I think having an actual visual interface to preview the generation in real time will be massively useful. Before, I would make changes to the algorithm in c++, then have to wait while it compiles and launches to see the changes. This is obviousl...

I put together a little planet generator a few months ago, thought I would share. The generation is based on several parameters like temperature(distance to sun), size, population etc… then it churns out these neat little pixel art planets. Pretty simple but a cool result, this was done in Unity3D.

Urho3d has a nice method for picking objects by casting a ray through the scene octree. This works well enough for picking objects using their AABBs but it was quite slow for picking points on a mesh. The issue now is that with the new terrain generation the mesh doesn’t even exist on the CPU, so it’s not possible now anyway. I thought about doi...

Previously the mesh for the terrain was generated on the CPU, both positions and normals. While this ‘worked’, it was extremely slow. So slow in fact, that it required the process to be split across multiple frames, usually it would take upward of 50 frames for one chunk to be ready on screen. Usually there are 9 chunks needed, so if the player ...

While trying to write the code to generate a mesh for the terrain I hit a few bugs which distorted the mesh vertices in all kinds of weird ways. I played around with it and got some interesting looking images.

I got invited into the cape.com drone flight beta. This technology involved is very cool. Basically you can remotely fly real drones from your laptop or phone anywhere in the world. You can select 1 of 7 locations in North America to launch the drone, and you can fly around for roughly 5 minutes or so. It’s free for the beta, I imagine you can f...