Ah, I have temporarily derailed my development ‘intent’ for Dom. I am impressed though, despite myself. It’s taken two years for this to finally bite.
This past couple of weeks has been a ‘Dom’ free dev week. Deliberately so. I have a small retro-arcade game burning my subconcious, and the only way to exorcise it’s Demon is to make the game. So, this past dev ‘cycle’ has been spent to that effect, and progressing nicely thankyouverymuch. (This side-project isn’t the ‘derailment’ btw… 🙂 )
But. Guilt set in. No Dom-dev being done 🙁
In an idle moment, I found myself browsing youtube (the saner parts) and looking at ‘planetary rendering’… having recently worked on the Celestial Bodies in Dom it ‘set the scene’ for my browsing. The youtube videos show such fantastic work being done, with various techniques at play… and I actually have some full-time, solid dev-days I can set aside… I wonder…
I gave myself a goal. A single, full-time day to do a prototype ‘infinitely tessellating spherical renderer’ (called Maggy), just to see how well my past thinking would gel with my plans. I also decided to do a ‘dev video diary’ (of sorts).
The result is quite long (10min!) and feel free to skip through, as it’s fairly dry on the visuals – but if you’re interested in the techy stuff, this is hopefully worthy of a watch!
I’m hoping to get another ‘full-time-man-day’ to spend on texturing and height data at some stage soon which will make it look far more interesting… although I strongly suspect I need to get down and dirty with a basic procedural solution. For the time being, I was intending to use the heightmaps and textures I’ve used so far in the Celestial Body work – but, mapping those textures to the new dynamic geometry may now be more math work than I care to take on given that the end goal is to use PGC anyway.
Bonus free ship on release (oho) to the first person to realise the ‘Maggy’ reference btw… 😉 and no, it’s nothing to do with Mr. Stewart…
Needless to say, as a ‘sensible development direction’ – this is somewhat lacking. Landing on planets entails a whole ballgame of ‘other issues’ (content, placement, persistence, interaction, et al) which I’m in no place to take on. That’s why in the original Kickstarter I said ‘not yet’ for “Landing on Planets”. Do not fear. I am not forging ahead on a whim which will leave all the work so far ‘gathering dust’ and never to see the light of day. I just need to realise some of the ideas and techniques ‘out loud’… a bit like the Procedural Level generation for ships and stations back in the day. Work will return back on track with the Minimum Viable Product shortly 🙂
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