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[cerapa]

v0.003 Download

Planets are now generated on a different thread, meaning that you are free to do whatever(like watch the blue thing spin) while it's being genned. Just wait until the console tells you how long it took for the generation, and click the planet again. If it takes very long, then choose the top-left star and planet 10, the genning of which takes 3.5 seconds for me.

At the moment I am most interested in the generation of planet 13. It's in a star on the upper-left, just down from the 3 in a straight line. If it takes as long to generate for others as it does for me, then I might need to tone down the upper end of the planet sizes.

[mastahcheese]

This looks so awesome.

[cerapa]

Here can be seen the difference between the tiles that are considered land, and the higher-resolution texture. Obviously leaves a lot to be desired, since it is kinda only looking at the center point of the tiles in a less precise version of the same noise used for the texture, but it takes just 3 milliseconds to generate(on a planet that takes 3 seconds to gen the texture). Might be covered up more by generally making the islands bigger, without any larger changes. Hmmm...

Still, I love the way it looks. I just threw some half-opacity squares onto the screen, and the tile lines did the edges all by themselves. Unless I'm going really fancy, the standard of showing the map modes will be like this from now on.

I might need to rewrite some display code now though. The huge discrepancy between texture and tile gen times shows that making the resolution of the planet textures an option rather than hardcoded is the primary means by which to reduce annoyance at long gen times, and to make the game look exactly as nice as the hardware allows. I wanted to rewrite the planet display anyway, to add in zooming.

[Anvilfolk]

What about a tree-like structure to identify landzones more effectively? You start with the whole square map. If the percentage of land/air tiles is between 25-75%, you divide it into 4, and recursively apply the algorithm (up to a maximum depth). Then you'd get tiles which are at least 75% water or 75% land, and more resolution only where needed!

[Skyrunner]

Someday I'm going to figure out how to do trees. Some day.

[cerapa]

What about a tree-like structure to identify landzones more effectively? You start with the whole square map. If the percentage of land/air tiles is between 25-75%, you divide it into 4, and recursively apply the algorithm (up to a maximum depth). Then you'd get tiles which are at least 75% water or 75% land, and more resolution only where needed!

I'm afraid you have misunderstood the way I generate terrain and tiles.

I just use simplex noise to generate heights and then set the tiles below the water level to be water tiles, and the ones above the waterlevel to be land tiles. There is no room for a tree-structure.

[Anvilfolk]

Oh, sorry. I thought the yellow highlighting was the way that you were computing which were the explorable tiles and which weren't. It just felt like a shame having so much potentially unexplored terrain Glad to hear that's not the case!

[cerapa]

v0.004 download
Now with 100% more hot zooming action(quite hard to accomplish, when the code that's meant to center the zooming on the mouse instead makes the planet spin at a speed best described as ludicrous). Apply mousewheel to planets for instant results. But don't go too close lest you awaken the Space Kraken that causes earthquakes and pixelization. Sadly the tile-dividing lines died when the Kraken was released, and the technology for reviving them has not yet been discovered.

Also now with actual options accessible through "init.txt". Choose between fullscreen and non-fullscreen, and any resolution you desire. And also the amount of pixels that each node/tile gets. Higher amounts keep the Space Kraken at bay for longer, but clearing the surface from Kraken gibs takes far longer the more you try to kill it. Ignore or delete the random fluff that's there just for debugging.

Pressing D while in planet view toggles the land/sea view on and off. If using it drops you below 60 FPS, then let me know, and I will put some work into optimizing the thing.

[cerapa]

Just gonna leave this as a teaser for now. You might be able to guess what this picture means if you have played CK2 or EU4(or any other strategy game by Paradox).

[mastahcheese]

That.
Is.
Awesome.

[cerapa]

This is what the above image looks like together with the actual terrain. It is dividing the the map up into different areas. It tries to group together areas that have a similar height. I can freely make them follow the terrain more, or to be more round, simply by changing a few weights.

I only have two problems right now. First is that I need to cull the really small 1 tile areas, which is very easy to do.

But the second and a bit harder problem is that at the moment I am putting the lines directly onto the planets texture. Zooming out causes the lines to flicker, and to appear in some places and not in others, which is exceptionally ugly.

[cerapa]

I've been mixing up my terminology a bit here, so I'm just gonna start using the stuff I use internally in the code. The smaller bits of terrain are called nodes and the larger ones are called regions. In my earlier usage Tile = Node and Area = Region.



Culling now implemented. No more fugly one node regions. It removes small regions by checking which region it has the largest border with, and then merging with it.

Would have been finished two days ago if I had noticed a pair of missing parentheses. Nothing quite like writing a long function, testing every single facet of it, and then finding that it was completely fine from the start and that the mistake was in an entirely different place.


And now a question for anyone reading this. I'm not quite sure if my current order of developing things is the right one. I currently create the framework for things, and then drop it as soon as it would be possible to do something cool with it. Basically I have tons of loose ends. After I finish up the proper region display code and make it understand which one you are clicking on, I will again be free to proceed onto the next thing.

Should I proceed onto the next thing(resource generation) which I am naturally attracted to, or take some time to polish up what I already have? I could do a lot with the graphics of the galaxy display, and implement zooming there as well. I could also make the planets actually understand whether they are burning hellholes or frozen hellholes(or the occasional jungle deathworld). What would you like to see me develop more?

[10ebbor10]

Well, it's your decision. You either build from the fundaments upward (as you're doing now) or you make something that works first, knowing that it'll probably rely on one or more placeholder systems that'll have to be removed.

[lemmily]

Definitely just do what you're attracted and excited about doing. There's nothing worse than feeling like you don't want to work on your hobby project. Obviously at some point if you want it to be playable you gotta bite the bullet and work on the more boring things occasionally

[Skyrunner]

Go with what you want. It's more important fun to make fully functioning code fast, then taking an age or two to wrap up all the loose ends.