Hello and welcome to the twelfth CardLife DevBlog,
Here’s what we have been working on this week (very similar to last week as we have started large tasks :)
World Terrain & Streaming
Brian and Ed are still deep in Voxel Farm code bending it to their will. We now have really good placement of discs (material you place down) with only a few small artifacts that are left to fix - mainly when discs are placed close to each other. Brian has also started to look at the streaming of the terrain LODs (level of detail). Like all modern games the terrain is split into different LODs to help performance, with the highest level of detail being the one that you are in which means you always see the best terrain up close. Currently though you can outpace the streaming and can end up in a lower LOD terrain which is not desired, so Brian has begun investigating ways we can improve that.
Connect the Dots Crafting
Aldo is continuing his work on the Connect the Dots crafting system and has the screen up and running with a 3D model and the ability to select which part of the creature you will be editing. It’s looking really promising but it’s early days yet for the development. He will be working on this for the next few weeks no doubt.
Digging VFX & Front End
Mike has now finished the Digging FX and the next step is to get it into game but that will happen when we have a coder free. He’s now begun work on the front end (main menu) for the game with the goal of creating the Join World screen where you select what world to play and the beginning of the character creation screens - which will largely made up of the Connect the Dots crafting screens with different headings.
World Terrain
As I mentioned last week, I have been looking into the terrain generation and I wanted to get stuck into World Machine - a third party terrain generation tool I have begun that process and it looks really good. I am really pleased with the results, but I’ll only be able to definitively say we are going to use it once we have the actual heightmap exported and imported into the CardLife game. Hopefully that will be done in the near future.
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That’s all for this week. It was just a quick update to let everyone know where we are in development and as usual, if you have any questions or thoughts please feel free to contact us via twitter, facebook, or on the forums. Have a great weekend.
Cheers,