Ymir "New Dawn": progress update

The big visual milestone is that I have finally completed the initial pass on all the biome types, including multiple new ones.
Each biome now uses a collection of many more trees, bushes and grass types compared to the legacy game, making the environment look much more visually diverse. There's now hundreds of trees, bushes and grass types in total!
Some are still somewhat placeholders that will need more variations/refining, but the overall design of every biome is now well defined.


Glacial


Sea ice


Tundra


Taiga


Oceanic


Continental


Steppe


Dry (old mediterranean)


Savanna (old arid)


Desert


Jungle (old tropical)


Monsoon (new biome, after subtropical monsoon/savanna, SE asia)


Humid (new biome, after subtropical humid, asia)


Every plant has been modelled after a real-world reference, to create more coherent biomes.
There's also now enough plant types per biome to allow for individual tiles to only include a random sub-selection of a biome's total plants, making different tiles of the same biome look less repetitive.



Terrain now includes a general 'grass shader' that gives relief to the grass layer of the terrain tiles.
It completes the placed grass objects to create a feeling of lush vegetation when needed, and helps integrate everything into the terrain making the 2D sprites look less floaty.




Terrain also includes a system of dynamic snow layer, based on the biome temperatures.
It may eventually be also connected to a dynamic meteo data allowing to have variations in snow coverage during a game.




World view has also of course been updated so that the biome of every tile can be visually identified.







The most basic game city building mechanics are funcional again: launching a game, placing basic buildings, accessing the main menus, creating and moving formations on the world map.
Buildings can now also be placed rotated, making buildings of the same type look much more visually diverse.



Porco citizens are finally roaming the lands again.



Camera controls allow you to change the vertical orientation and see your city with the perspective of the horizon, integrating it more within the planet's landscape.



By holding the space bar, you can in fact freely rotate the camera in any way you want horizontally or vertically.



It was already mentioned in previous updates, but once a tile has been initially loaded during the session, zooming in and out of it becomes seamless.









Buildings will be a mix of 3d converted buildings and legacy 2D placeholders, the idea being to gradually keep replacing buildings to their full 3D version. In priority this will be houses, merchants and large special buildings such as government buildings.

A lot of display systems remain to be redone:
Resources in warehouses, fields, roads, fences, stairs, simple walls, platforms...
Each system requires its own approach and to be redone from scratch to work within the new graphics framework.
Then, pathfinding has to be modified and updated to work with the new terrain system, and lastly the whole system of battle display as well.






As you can imagine, making such a new game will take a lot of time.
It's quite a desert crossing for me as it leaves the legacy game un-updated for all that time (causing a natural drop in interest and sales) while this 'new game' still has a long way to go.
Any support on Patreon is REALLY more than welcome.
It is rewarded with a special Discord room where i discuss and share daily updates about the progress of "New Dawn" with my Patrons, and an exclusive access to the New dawn WIP builds so you can see it for yourself on your PC!