Posted January 24, 2019 by PixelForest
A lot of users have asked for an option to make bigger landscapes, initially i had the idea that you could just paint smaller things to give you the feeling of a bigger landscape, but that is not really clear from a users perspective and also with that came some problems with the physics system and some flying animals behaving strangely.
So i thought, alright, lets add a slider for bigger landscapes, that should be easy, right?
Here is a little dev blog explaining how everything in a game is tightly knit together and how small changes can take a really long time.
So lets add a slider.
Alright, im done.
oh wait, now the mask that blends the water line is screwed up. better fix that.
Now the flying animals dont go to the edges of the map. Oh yeah, i coded the ai to turn around after 10m so they dont fly off. better link that to the scale.
The water tiling looks too big, better link that to scaling.
The procedural scatter limits slider are now not large enough
The sound fx are procedurally scattered and have a range, so i have to scatter more the larger the landscape.
Now that you can paint more, i better add a LOD system... hmm that will take some time.
The rain is off scale.
The trees look like they are blowing in a gale, thats because i initially coded the vertex animation shader to be based on distance from the centre, so that there is less wind in the middle and more on the edges. Now that there is a larger landscape they are in a hurricane at the edges...
and thats not all of it haha
Thought id give you a little insight how tricky some seemingly simple things might be :)
and if updates take some time, this is why