Official Media Thread

[SweptThrone]

Week of February 17, 2025

Fully Random Houses




This week, I finished all 16 house material textures and made house generation 100% random.

  House data is stored as a 32-bit integer.  Previously, I would manually set individual bits within ranges when "randomly" generating a house and then interpret them later.  What would happen if one of these bits were somehow set to a value outside of my predetermined ranges?  Who knows!  So, this week, I changed a few things about how houses generated to allow me to just generate a fully-random 32-bit integer to generate a valid house.
  As part of this change, I had to create full house textures for all 16 materials that houses can be made out of which was not fun.  Each individual house can have a different material for its foundation, its walls, and its roofing.  The door will copy the foundation's material and windows will copy the wall's material.
  As yet another part of this change, every one of the 32 bits that make up a house's data are used.  Large houses of over six tiles wide may now generate with or without a double roof crest, and any house can now have a smaller extra level above the walls.  The first image attached showcases a sample platter of new, fully-random houses.

1. A simple house only to showcase complete randomness.
   
2. A small house with an extra level.
   
3. A wide house with a single roof crest and an extra level.
   
4. Another small house with an extra level.
   
5. A wide house with two roof crests and an extra level.
   
6. A small side-view house with an extra level.
   
7. A simple wide house with two roof crests.
   

  Finally, I also started working on the various structure shapes to add yet another level of variety to houses.  This actually caused a lot more issues than I figured when starting, so I was only able to partially complete T-shaped houses, an example of which is shown in the second image.  This structure is not final as I'm not very satisfied with the overall appearance.  When all shapes are done, large houses—houses wider and longer than six units—will be the only houses that can have shapes; small houses will be restricted to rectangles.
  With all of these factors, Tale of Flocksworth will have thousands of unique house styles to find!  I love buzzwords!
  The last thing I tackled this week was texture bleeding.  When moving around the world, it was very common to see single strips of pixels bleeding into textures, particularly noticeable around the tops of roofs.  I battled with this problem for at least an hour, changing countless settings back and forth to no avail.  In an act of desperation, I upgraded Godot to 4.4 RC-1 and the issue was either solved or just decided to not happen anymore.  Either way, I'm expecting the worst.

This was a remarkably long update post, but that just means I'm moving things along.  If you're here, thanks for reading!