November 30 - Diagonal Ruins
This week's update adds diagonal blocks and ruins to the world! Plus a facelift for the starter biome.
I've added diagonal blocks! This has been a long time coming and not the last block type I plan on adding, but is quite time consuming to do. For every new block type I want to add, I need to add it to every single block tileset which requires very exact coordinate requirements in each one, plus I need to model every possible combination. Right now there are 12 unique tilesets, and the diagonals had 12 possible combinations, for a total of 144 models I needed to build pixel-perfect meshes and UVs for so they'd all fit together properly. In the early days I used fewer models and just rotated them as necessary, but that caused UV and alignment issues.
The benefit though is we can have much more interesting geometry and shapes for terrain, with fewer right angles and boxes. Some tilesets are a straight diagonal while others opt for a more rounded shape. I've added diagonals as a step to the world gen in order to further smooth out the caves.
I changed the default starter biome to include more mountains, since I figured it would make the starter area a bit more picturesque and less boring. I think I was right.
Ruins have been added to the world. Decayed long-forgotten structures that contain treasure to scavenge. These initial ruin designs were made by ToadTod, so big thanks to her! If you like to build stuff in voxels and want to help out, get in contact with me. The big limiter on stuff like more ruins, enemy camps, and towns is how long they take to make despite being really easy to make. Like an hour of me making a house is an hour that could have been spent putting in a new feature or fixing a bug. I work with a priority queue, so while "more enemy camp variety" is on there, it's below "furniture sometimes falls through the ground" or "more insects to catch." Anyway, ruins are a cool thing to find while exploring and help fill out the world. I tried to make them rare enough that they're fun to investigate. They complete all the essential gameplay elements for the survival playstyle where you can live entirely off the land as a nomad, exploring the world without doing much crafting, building, or farming.
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