Reworked temperate forest biome

This week’s focus was on getting as close as possible to the next tech demo. Unfortunately I did not get the demo completely ready just yet and will require a couple more days to finish some of the things that should be tested in that version. I also put some more work into the temperate forest biome that will be included in the demo. For that I did proper research on what can be found in these types of forests and how they look. Going from my research I scrapped the old randomly put together forest and started from scratch. To match the new vegetation quality I also implemented proper terrain textures for the forest. I personally think that the new version looks much more authentic than the previous one. It features much more diverse and dense vegetation while maintaining a good performance overall without any real optimizations yet. Optimizations will be done after the upcoming tech demo to be able to measure how much of an impact they will have. Feel free to let me know what you think about the new forest and how authentic you think it is. There are still several passes for the forest to undergo until it hopefully reaches what I have for it in mind. Besides the forest biomes the rest of the week consisted mostly of crucial bug fixes related to the road generation, the terrain shader I added last week and the dynamic occlusion culling system which turned out to only work in the editor but not in the actual game. Those things have been taken care of, hopefully allowing me to focus on gameplay and additional work on vegetation next week. Today I also posted the first progress report on the game’s steam page covering the entire month of June in review. If you haven’t wishlisted the game yet, feel free to head over to the steam page and do so. It’s free and helps the game be discovered by more people.

Notable tasks this week:

• Extended the terrain generation algorithms to allow more control over the terrain shape

• Created new temperate forest biome

• Various performance optimizations and bug fixes

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.
Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.