Yes, I’m still alive!
What happened? Work happened. Basically, it got more demanding and I had to cut out development time. But I’ve normalized my schedule a bit and gotten a nice routine going and I’ve been able to squeeze the time back in.
I’ll be realistic here: expect sporadic posts from now on. Some weeks I’ll have plenty of development time; others I’ll have none. It’s just the nature of the beast, I’m afraid.
Anyway, when we left off, I had a dynamic globe that took 45 seconds to generate. Well now I have a dynamic globe that takes 12 seconds to generate.
I know, not very impressive, right? But I had to do some major re-architecting under the hood. Before, I was taking up valuable time by generating the blended texture myself based on the heightmap and using an extremely inefficient algorithm to create both of them; now, I’m generating the heightmap using better math, then using it to create a four-color blending map before finally feeding that to a custom shader that does all the work of smooshing textures together based on the colors in the blending map.
Did any of that make any sense? I don’t think so. But the important part is that it’s more efficient and faster. A lot faster! From hitting “play” to looking at the end result, it typically takes 10-13 seconds on my computer, which is 3 years old now.
Oh yeah, and I also did some prettifying:
It still has the ugly seam (it’s actually worse now) and it still sometimes creates Waterworlds and Tatooines. But I’m making progress again and I have some good ideas to fix the latter issue. And one of these days, I’m going to upload a playable tech demo — one of the awesome things about Unity is that you can compile your game to a web-playable format, no matter how graphically complex it is! You’ll have to grab their web player plug-in though, so you might want to do so now.
Nothing wrong with a few Waterworlds and Tatooines. Hoth would be better though. Try to get it to glitch into a Hoth.
Man, that would totally be possible if I capped the highest mountains with snow — all you would need is a planet mesh that’s so high that the whole thing gets counted as snow-capped peaks! I’m trying to give to user more control, though. If you want a Waterworld, for example, you just have to set the “land coverage percent” to 0.