Procedural wall features & house improvements

This week was split into even more experimenting with the new art style for the game and the creation of a couple new systems that should make the gameplay (especially the scavenging) a lot more immersive and fluent. I will not be showcasing such systems in this devlog because I would like to conduct performance tests for those systems first. This is to ensure I won’t show any features that I would potentially have to remove afterwards. If I get all the necessary features completed and tested next week I can showcase them in the following devlog. For the art style I moved from the objects and items to the walls, floors and ceilings. They now all have support for features like procedural grunge, damage etc. The performance seems to be pretty solid so far but I do need to verify this on a larger scale once more objects are in the game to ensure I don’t have to create a separate optimization system or if I do, create it sooner rather than later. Since I spent a fair amount of time working with walls and ceilings I also decided to create a new house for testing the new art style. While working on the house I noticed that the current tile sizes that make up a house/building are a bit too small to allow certain room sizes to be compatible with procedural furnishing. Floor tiles have a size of 2.5x2.5m making it too small to be used for 1x1 or 1xX sized rooms. This is due to the adjacent walls making this space even smaller leaving not enough space for furniture to be comfortably placed. Before continuing with the creation of more houses and other buildings such as the gas station, fire department etc I decided to devote a bit of time experimenting with different tile sizes. Increasing the tile size to 3x3m made such a big difference and allows those 1xX room shapes to be fully compatible with the procedural furnishing that I settled on and adjusted all the models to match the new tile criterias. An increase of only 0.5m on each axis may sound very little but it increases the available area by about 50% which makes a massive difference. Lastly I did devote a couple hours to lighting this week. There has been light bleeding through walls for the entirety of the project so with the new houses coming together I decided it’s finally time to take care of that too in order to get an even better ambience in the new house. Luckily fixing this didn’t take too long and the results are great. I will finally be adding proper lighting to the house interior too which should be available in the next tech demo version.

Notable tasks this week:

• Added procedural features like grunge, moss and damage to walls, floors and ceilings

• Experimented and created new systems for more immersive scavenging/looting. More details soon.

• Updated house models to fit to tile size requirements (2.5m to 3m)

• Fixed light bleeding through walls and ceilings

• Created new house with new features and tile size

Wishlist on Steam

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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.