Official Media Thread

[SweptThrone]

Week of June 16, 2024

Path Generation



This week, I made paths generate as...paths.

Paths now generate as paths, starting in a random spot, picking a random direction, and spreading forwards and backwards.  Obviously this is not how the final version of paths are going to look, rather this is just a baseline version of them.  In the future, I'm gonna be working on adding more path tiles around these "control points" so they look more filled out and natural.  I might also change how often paths decide to turn.
As you might be able to tell, currently only the origin panel has a path on it.  I'm planning to have the origin panel be the only one with a path that starts nowhere and from it, other paths lead to towns and stuff.  In the final game, you'll spawn in the middle of the forest and will have to walk around a bit before finding a town.  There will be other points of interest along the way, but towns are going to have some space between them.

[SweptThrone]

Week of July 5, 2024

Noise Paths



This week, I took one step backwards and two steps forward.

Paths are now generated using Simplex noise instead of my own reinvention of the wheel. After writing my path generation code last week, I had several thoughts of things that could go wrong and started thinking of how I could fix and prevent them. I figured that using noise to create paths would be the best thing to do, and so I did. There were also some other issues - yet again relating to path connecting - that I noticed while taking this week's video, so I fixed those as well.
The world is finally beginning to take form and look like a world meant for exploring. I've noticed some flickering issues when props are loaded into view, which is something I'll have to investigate. Also, if it wasn't obvious, props won't be disappearing and reappearing from your view in the final game.
Originally, I wasn't going to use noise simply because I didn't think there were any noise generators included with Godot, but I was wrong! For some reason I'm under the impression that Godot (as well as any other engine) is a bare minimum set of tools to make a game - more like a graphics library than a full game engine - and that's been contributing to me doing a lot of stuff from scratch when I don't need to. I've been using the term "reinventing the wheel" a lot in progress reports and update posts because that's what I've been doing. I feel like it's been slowing me down a bit, so it's something I have to work on.

[SweptThrone]

Week of July 7, 2024

Town Generation and Random Grass



This week, I made an incredibly early version of town generation.

I also added a super basic developer console with a few command to help me debug and a function to convert Arabic numerals to Roman numerals. I also changed how grass and paths are textured. As you can see in the image, all of the bare grass tiles look different from each other. You might also be able to notice that path is now drawn on top of grass tiles instead of having the grass as a part of its texture. The pink question mark tiles on the top right of the image are the considered bounds for a town. I'm not sure how big I want towns to be yet, but I think I'm happy with the size I have now. Towns are generated using Perlin noise with "strong" parts of the noise corresponding to towns. I also hope the parameters I've chosen will strike a good balance between town size and distance.
As I was exploring this primitive version of the world, I noticed the edges of distant panels had an error texture. I was about to dive in to fixing path edges for the third or fourth time before realizing that in standard gameplay, the player would never be able to see those edges anyway.

[SweptThrone]

Week of August 4, 2024

Early Structure Generation



This week, I finished the first version of house construction.

I still have a lot to go because I also want to add T-shaped houses, U-shaped houses, and L-shaped houses, and then of course I need some way to create special structures such as churches. I'm also not terribly happy with how side-facing houses look, I feel like there's too much roof. Obviously the houses don't yet have doors or windows either, which is another thing I have yet to do. My final and busiest semester starts very soon, so I'm not sure how much I'll be able to work on ToF in the near future, but we'll see!

[SweptThrone]

Week of October 28, 2024

Double-Roofed Houses



This week, I finished the basic construction of houses, with both one roof and two.

This took longer than expected because I was trying to run a check against a Y-coordinate when it should've been an X-coordinate. Oops! As far as I know, I've written the house-generation code in a way that it should properly support an infinite range of house widths. Currently, the width of houses is limited between three and ten, but it should be able to make houses of any width. I also spent a bit of time organizing and cleaning up what I've written so far to make it easier to do things in the future. Before this week, I used a Structure class to create houses, but this week I changed that to a House class that derives from the Structure class. This led me down a short web search that resulting in me reading about how inheritance is apparently not normally the best thing to use in game development, which was definitely an interesting thing to think about.
The above image showcases three variations of houses, each of which have been procedurally-generated. It should be obvious that all textures are placeholder programmer art and are not final.