Well its been quite a while, lots of things have changed including going back to work, lol.
I haven’t really been keeping up with the different versions of my Terrain Generator like I should and from looking at the posts, it looks like I haven’t explained the change from Mesh Terrain Generator to a Voxel Terrain Generator.
I was pretty happy with my Mesh Terrain Generator, up until it came time to incorporate digging, mining and dropping a piece of terrain on the ground. Once I ran into this, thats when I decided to change the style to a voxel terrain. They are perfect for terrain deformation and (supposedly) make it easier to manage deformation, especially in real time.
My main inspiration for this style was 7 Days To Die! Phenomenal survival game that I got addicted to many years ago. I put way too many hours into that game, but damn they did good.
Another one was Empyrion. A lot like 7 Days To Die! in the terrain deformation area, but totally different setting and style. You can build your own space ship! Who wouldn’t love that?!
In my adventure of trying to figure out how to create a Voxel based terrain generator, I looked over tons of articles, videos and tried to find as much info as I could about it. One of the best sources of info I found was from B3AGZ on youtube. He had a pretty good start up tutorial on how to create a voxel terrain like 7 Days To Die. It wasn’t completed, but it did give me a pretty good head start.
I basically had to start my terrain generator all over, which sucked just due to the time I put in it, but every piece of code written adds more knowledge to the gray sponge, so its never a waste.
So I incorporated a lot of the things I used in my mesh terrain generator, like the map settings screen, the noise functions and generating the map data. I basically had to covert it to create voxels instead of a mesh using a customized marching cubes algorithm.
In each version iteration, I steadily added more details and control, to get things working. I believe it was around version 9 that I added biomes and made a video here…https://youtu.be/ZwNB3Y6hb2c.
That was prety cool, but ultimately I decided to ditch biomes for now. They just added a level of complexity I didn’t want in my Voxel Terrain Generator right now. I wanted to get it back to basics.
In my KOTC_VoxTerrGen version 0013, I finally got all the trees, (1) bush, (3) flowers and (3) stones added. I had to change the grass from being shader instanced to an actual game object so that users will be able to interact with it and gather it. The same goes for all the different objects.
I am pretty much compete with the terrain generation part. My next steps will be adding ores to the terrain so I can mine them! I also want to be able to dig, mine and drop different voxel types on the ground from within the map generator. This will allow me to create caves, overhangs, rivers and all different kinds of terrain details. I will then be able to export the map and import it into a game!
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think by leaving a comment!
You can check out the Version 0013 video on you tube here…https://youtu.be/NSfDeWYb0O8.
