80 – Bumpy ride

I uploaded Snapshot 8. This time it is a real snapshot. The point of the snapshot systems was to get version out there. Release early, release often. But taking 1-3 days before a release to polish up a weekly snapshot kind of defeats the purpose of it all. So I took the best version I had at the moment, did 30 minutes of testing and labeled it Snapshot 8. I'm hoping I will do this for all future snapshots. Once in a while a super stable version will be releases. Then it is OK to super polish it.

With the freed up time I gained from not extensively polishing the last snapshot I added tree cutting, plant harvesting, food stockpiles and sacks. And maybe a few questionable interface choices :).

The rest of the time I worked on the new model for the world. The short blocks were cute, but I realized I want more than that. In the end I did not go with either the voxel/DF model or the multi-heightmap model. I am using something in between.

The world can now have any shape. You still interact with it using a grid based system, so a few mechanics might turn out to be a little bit awkward, at first at least. I am also constraining the world to have a fairly large flat-ish surface where you can act. This is level zero. Level zero is special because it is tightly linked to the above levels. These levels can not be represented in isolation. Level 0 and the above landscape constitutes the "overlevel". This is the first type of level. The second type of level are the underground levels. These can be represented in isolation, and you can just place two on top of each other and they will look good. 

Free-form shape worlds also mean ramps. Ramps are a huge pain in the butt and I hated implementing them from day one. How do you solve this? By making everything a ramp!

Since the world is free-form, I ended up with a system that takes the height of the land in a small rectangular area, interprets it and makes some judgement. We wind up with the following classes of mini height-maps:

• 0: here elevation is very mild. You can freely walk on top of it and you can place items on it.
• 1: you can still walk on it, but elevation is unregulated enough that you can't place items. There are not many such cases, this is mostly a transition block so you'll often ignore them, and if you really need to place an item there you'll flatten it first.
• 2: here elevation change is so abrupt that normally you won't be walking up or down there. This seems a little bit strange because clearly a dwarf could walk on that zone. But dwarves are all about changing the environment and traversal optimization. They don't want to climb even a medium incline with a backpack and while caring stuff, so they would rather flatten it first. But the area is not high enough to allow you dig a cave in it. This is another transition tile and the most awkward of them all. This is somewhat compensated by the fact that you'll only need to dig out a few such tiles before you get to the good stuff:
• 3: very high blocks! Here you can dig caves. You can have an elevation level at great height and under that a lower elevation level defining the cave

This is like in real life, if you would dig a cave though a hill. You start of on a relatively straight piece of land. The first few meters you did the highest point you had to remove dirt from is probably a lot shorter than you. As you continue, the dirt levels around you rise and rise, until you can't dig from the highest point to level zero, but instead start digging caves. In real life everything would cave in upon you! But this is dwarf world! Get me Keanu Reeves!

I implemented all this except for the last part, cave digging:

Surprisingly almost nothing got broken by this change. Quite a few systems needed minor adjustments. Items are no longer placed on high elevation tiles. I could place them inclined, but this is very dangerous. At the slightest provocation I'll start implementing physics and then I'll never finish the game! The problem is that this way hills look to barren. Some plants will still be placed there in the future and I probably need to add clutter/detail objects here and there. Trees needed to be adjusted to be placed at correct height and so did dwarves for walking purposes.

And don't get me started on how bland the elevation looks! I still have no clue how I could possibly shade that. Oh lighting, you so whack!

I found plenty of advanced solutions for terrain. I need something simple in the first stages. So please don't link me to that awesome pixel shader 3 terrain implementation that does height maps with GPU and what not. I need "baby's first terrain" shading solution. And things like "take the normal, multiply it with the direction of the sun and recite a poem" won't help yet, because I am not generating normals for the terrain. So much to learn!!!

But otherwise pretty good. It took me a few hours to implement this.

Next step is to make caves work again. And get Snapshot 9 ready with this new terrain, while hopefully not losing or diminishing a single feature.