After utilizing first core game loop - killing mobs & leveling up I decide to make something more visual and started digging in new Procedural Content Generation (PCG for short) introduced with newest UE5. It still kinda buggy and has some limits. But its already shows their powers with comparison to previous method of Foliage Instances tool. PCG works in graph-like base with In an Out pins and transformations between. PCG happens in Square volumes and can react to landscape, their slope.
Forrest biome
First thing I tried with these new PCG was a creation of new basic Forrest biome, previous attempt was only spawning trees from server as a part of Instanced Foliage Mesh, this allows you spawn multiple actors as a one a save precious resources. It works well but looks kinda doll. I sit down and start redefine how should Forrest looks like. It needs kinda feel of leaves on grounds and and also a moss and grads now and then. So I take my ground texture for grassland and edit RGB spectrum with nice results of getting same texture with variations in brown color pallet. Then I created a new landscape layer for forest and blend together grassland layer with this new brown. Tweak variations on it and Tada. Improvement already done.
After that I repaint new place for Forrest and start spawn things through PCG, small amount of grass, stones, and then tree variants, after that I need make ignore for paths, that's still kinda tricky but I eventually made it easier with landscape splines.
Also there was a problem with need of spawn only in areas not in whole square, so I combine more resources of tutorials and blog posts and after some obstacles and dozens of crashes of my editor I done it! I have zones know only inside a concrete spline area within PCG volume cube.
There are some future changes needed to be done, like tweak collisions and spawn trees and other resources - mushrooms, berries, plants and rocks through server input, but for now it may be kept in this way as it's already helps with visual so much.
Previous iteration
Current iteration
Grassland biome
Grassland are next one I do, it's still kinda not satisfied with it, but it may take more iterations than Forrest to start looking I was hope. Also there still missing some stuffs on them, so maybe if they stops being so plains it will be eventually better.
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