Last weeks are kinda hectic so I take a free time for myself and my family. But there is still progress in Project SoA.
Most of progression happens on About section and also in my head with another things shaping whole game design
document. In game there are new Water, whole island is now filled with paths and I currently works on creating biomes on
whole island. More about in article.
After last upadate in previous article I playing with relatively new Water system in Unreal Engine. Its still tricky and I think it has many bugs inside as it's not smooth as it should be and I must also use tricks to get wanted results. The worst thing is extending landscape which has unexpected behaviour and destroys my whole landscape data. I still don't know what that happens, maybe it's caused by some settings in project from previous version, but after some fighting with engine itself in editor with crashes I figure an acceptable result.
Water System
So Right now we have a ocean around island made with new Unreal Engine Water System. Sadly, rivers are currently no go as that still destroys whole map :/ I will give another try in future as a plugin gets more stable. Currently its still an experimental thing. But even with that its already better answer from Epic to how create water in UnrealEngine.
Paths
In previous iteration of PCG (Procedural Content Generation) I need also works with paths, so I already started researching possibilities how to make a paths in SoA. I already tried a method of "printing" whole route with all material into Runtime virtual texture which is used with my Landscapes, this time I play more with native thing inside an Engine which allows creating you Landscape Splines which also can edit landscape heights around routes so you doesn't have to sculpt them yourself. (Thats the green spline on screen lower).
The last way which I used for now is just paint the routes in Landscape layers which works visually and helps prototype me with speed before I decide.
Routes are currently mostly painted on Landscape, but they will be eventually iterated with different approach
I still not sure which way I go, but I know we need a more control of routes as they should be paired also on server side for AI pathing, buffs, safe zones etc.. I simply need export routes outside of engine so there should be more than just painting.
Filling map with biomes
Third thing which I worked last days are filling the map with forrest biomes. After some tweaks with PCG Volume and set it to partially I can drop all others volumes and create only one for whole island which really simplify this process and I can just focus on marking areas of forrest biome with my spline actors which reacts with PCG Volume graph and provide "zones" for which PCG graph reacts.
Not exactly done with all of them as it can be seen on image, but its really getting closer.
Next steps are make some work on grasslands biomes in world.
Thanks for reading till the end of this diary entry. If you wanna ask anything or have any form of feedback or you are just interested , consider joining our community on Discord.