Fancy Pants

Much effort has gone into the terrain generator and Voxoid rendering engine in the past month! As you can see from the scene above, we've got depth-of-field into the scene, and there's some actual bump mapping finally correctly applied to the correct coloured voxels, particularly noticeable on the rocks highlighted by the mouse light there.

How Does It All Fit Together?

We've got the rocky cliff formations sorted to our liking - still some room for improvement but that will have to wait until I get Wave Function Collapse working. In the meantime though it is surprising just how interesting you can get a scene to look with so few source graphics. Every model we load in we rotate and mirror every which way which greatly increases the variation for almost zero effort.

The main cliff parts - the taller, deeper sections of wall - are made up of just these bits:

Yep, that's right - just three models. We have a whole bunch more models waiting in the wings that aren't used yet awaiting the aforementioned wave function collapse code to work.

Around the edges of the deep cliffs, we've got "rocks":

And around the edges of rocks, we've got "rough":

Rocks are impassable to battledroids, but rough can be traversed with varying degrees of speed depending on their drive units. The drive units we've got in the game are bipedal, tripedal, quadripedal, wheeled, tracked, hovercraft, and antigrav. Wheels are particularly badly affected by rough ground.

There are patches of rough ground generally scattered around the terrain too, which will affect droid pathing as they try to reach their targets. I wonder how many people noticed in Revenge of the Titans that the invading Titans often take pains to avoid the blotchy ground because it slows them down to half speed? Probably less than noticed how they go twice as fast on roads.

There's also grass - it has no actual effect on gameplay, it's purely cosmetic. This is blitted using splatting, with a "max" operator - the grass is defined to use a range of palette indices which can only be overwritten by a colour with a greater palette index, so the splats blend together nicely. We use a similar technique to put appropriate floor underneath rocks, rough, and cliff models.

We've also got crevasses, which are currently all filled with water that looks rather more like liquid oxygen than water. The crevasses parts are slightly more complex, and are made up of edge pieces and inverted and non-inverted corner pieces:

You can probably just make out from the MagicaVoxel scene there that the very top of the crevasse models is aligned with the zero plane; the crevasses extend downwards under the floor plane by 64 voxels (which is the depth we arbitrarily decided to have the game played at - the world terrain depth is a maximum of 256 voxels).

I've filled them all with water for now because we're probably going to be working on making water look good this month, amongst other things. Here's the aforementioned liquid oxygen, slightly more closeup:

It undulates slowly at the moment. In due course it will also be textured, bump and gloss mapped, and reflective to some degree.

Battledroids obviously can't cross water unless they've got hovercraft drives or antigrav. When there's no water in there, we've got a crevasse, which is impassable by all kinds of drive units, even antigrav (which keeps a droid a set distance off the ground ... not so useful if they plummet over the edge of a crevasse though, eh?)

Rivers and crevasses are quite interesting tactically because you can see your enemies over them, and even shoot them; but most of the units won't be able to path across them.

I'll keep up the monthly posting on Patreon more or less, although this month is special because we've done a couple of noteworthy things recently. First and foremost, Brian has finally finished Faerie Solitaire Harvest! And secondly, we've decided that over the following year we're going to eventually have all of our titles released on Linux for free, over at itch.io, starting with Basingstoke, which is available right now, for nothing.

Not that it matters to you Patroids, because you're entitled to all our stuff for free anyway :)

Help Spread The Word

Could I ask of you a teeny weeny favour? Nobody knows about Basingstoke. Nobody knows about Battledroid. Nobody knows about Faerie Solitaire Harvest. Help! Can you let everyone you know about what we're up to? We desperately need to increase our Patreonage. Thx <3