New World - world changes and improvements
DOMEN KONESKI

I was very skeptical about New World and changing the current world of Floatlands. The world included floating islands, debris and details such as clouds. There was a lot of unused space (air) which was not defined gameplay-wise in any way.  It was only a medium for traveling from one island to another, therefore making it a really boring routine to do. We could fix and improve that by doing various things:

• allowing players to build in the air with more air-play,
• creating more debris/objects where players could land in the mid air,
• designing ‘spacecrafts’ with whom you could travel trough the world (good idea, but it is not appopriate lore-wise since we really want to improve on smaller aircrafts such as our little Buzzard),
• creating a ground level terrain which covers entire playable area (which should be large) with terrain.

The decision was obvious, we went with the latter choice (hint was in the previous blogpost). I started working on the so called Main Land island which we will include in Floatlands. Main Land will include all biomes we introduced already and floating islands. It will also have water (sea & rivers), Humans of Floatlands, our beautiful animals, basically everything we already worked on.

I’ve already done a lot towards creating this new ground level of Floatlands. There’s a whole-new procedural terrain generation, color blending between biomes and height differences, whole-new grass renderer using some advanced techniques and our current day/night cycle system.

 

The technical part of the New World

First of all, we generate the height map trough different sets of Perlin noises. We also have a biome map, which represents which biome is at specific position. The best part about this biome map is amount of mathematic principals and algorithms I’ve used to create a procedural biome map so it would look as natural as possible. Have a look:

Biome map texture

Blue represents sea/lakes/rivers, green represents our ‘normal’ biome (take a look at the bottom right, you can clearly see some micro islands will form), yellow-ish is desert and white are mountains with our snow biome. I easly implemented rivers using custom made Growing Trees algorithm. Here is the first test I ever did (it looks like ice cream – don’t mind the colors):

First procedural generation test with color blending

Meanwhile Mito and Andrej remodeled some of our trees, created new concepts for our metal/niter/stone veins (we’ve been using old models and they were really outdated speaking of general design).

Current state of the New World.

In conclusion, we have also produced a short video showcasing the current state of the new world (note that floating islands are still missing in the video).
 

You’re all welcome to join us on Floatlands Discord server and have a chat with us.