Terraforming Tower Fall

[p]We're making good progress now on the upcoming Tower Fall DLC map. Located west of Amethyst and Slough Creek, and south of Hellroaring, the Tower Fall map features a central high plateau with gently rolling hills, plus the Yellowstone River Canyon to the east and, of course, Tower Fall itself in the north. After the various distractions of the spring and summer, it's been great to finally have time to really work on this map. [/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]Like the other Yellowstone game maps, Tower Fall is based on actual areas of the park, using elevation and satellite data to determine topography and ground cover. But as amazing as it is to have those data as resources, they are still relatively low resolution for our needs in a game map. So each map then requires a lot of work to shape and fine-tune the terrain, rocks, and vegetation. Today's devblog looks at what we've been doing to get the upcoming Tower Fall DLC map in shape. [/p][p]We've lately been using a new tool in Unity, called MicroVerse (created by Jason Booth, who also created the MicroSplat terrain shader that we've been using from the start in WQ:AE). MicroVerse gives us some incredible powers to shape the terrain in realtime, so we tweak and nudge and push the terrain around endlessly. (And I mean endlessly!) [/p][p]For example, it has a Spline tool that is very useful for building the road that runs through the game map, allowing us to configure the road to match the actual route in real-world Yellowstone, while also forcing the terrain to always match the road's elevation (which previously was much trickier to do). It also has some cool stamping tools that let us create detailed topography around den sites, for example. After making over 100 dens on other maps, it's tough to come up with new den ideas, but Tower Fall does now have a couple that make my Favorites list.[/p][p]Watch the video to see these tools in action! And stay tuned for more about Tower Fall![/p]