StaudSoft's Synthetic World News

Hey guys,
I increased the speed of the 3D engine. Now a much more detailed landscape is possible:





I also updated the world generator:



Just for fun I added an ocean:



And I connected all caves with each other! The world generation speed is now 5 times faster!

Note that in order to see the higher view range you need to increase the "View Distance" in the game settings.

Along with this I added a lot of bug fixes regarding the trees, player movement, GUI, plants, textures and so on.

The new version is in the unstable branch.

Hello and welcome back,

before we start with the development update, I want to wish you all a good health. These are hard times during the Coronavirus crisis. I hope we all get better soon.



In the last weeks I had the flu, so I had a lot of time to create new assets:

New houses for the city generator: Till now I used random generated houses. This looked not very good, so I started to make hand made buildings. Along with the exterior, all these buildings have furniture and waypoints for the NPCs


Forests: I created 5 new tree types and made the forests more dense. This is possible because of the new tree rendering system.






I created over hundred new models that can be used in the game. I created furniture for the kitchen, food, city elements, windows, doors.
Just for fun I also created adventure game assets.


The low end rendering engine is now a high performance forward rendering system, with bump mapping, radiosity and so on. Now I only need to create lightmaps during runtime and then I can use the new renderer. This will greatly improve the performance.
Faster shadow rendering: I created a new shadow rendering system:



Improved tree rendering: I found some bugs in the renderer that prevent the correct rendering of the trees.



Far Rendering: The quality of the far rendering is also improved. I found some bugs in the lod system.

LOD rendering for trees: Trees are now automatically rendered to textures when they are far away. Then only the textures are displayed.

World generation: I changed the world generator to create more flat terrain. This is necessary so that there is more space to place buildings.

Instanced Meshes (voxel and normal): This can be used to speed up the creation of maps for the game.

A lot of bug fixes and improved usability.

The editor now can use to created games.

And the biggest thing: I have finally found a solution to the city generator problem. I think it is pretty cool. But I do not want to tease it now :-)

When I am finished with bug fixing I will upload a new version!

Yes! The first village generated by the AI!



This is only a debug view. When it is finished these buildings will actually be placed in the landscape!

We will improve the performance in the next weeks so that we can create bigger cities. And we are testing other AI algorithms.

Hey, I just uploaded a new version to the unstable build with the new trees. You need to create a new map with the generator to see them (so do not use the predefined map with the seed 0).

Be aware: This is only a testing release. It could be that a map create with this version can't be loaded in a later version.

Now most of the visual bugs in the trees are resolved:





I will upload an unstable release as soon as possible.

And I implemented several AI algorithms that will drive the city generation:

- A* Planning
- Alpha-Beta Adversary Search
- Monte Carlo Tree Search

Except for the first one these algorithms are normally used in Chess AI / Go. I am excited to see how they work out.

The first tests will be on a small landscape of several hundred meters.