Hello everyone,
I'm releasing a test Age that you might find interesting.
It's one of those weird experiments of mine, which means: not much to do in it, but you may find it interesting if you have nothing better to do.
Here !
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f5u0v46zjk8n5 ... n.zip?dl=1
What it is
This Age is the result of an algorithm for procedural terrain generation - hence it's name, Protergen (I'm lazy when it comes to names ! )
Meaning Blender was only used to import the ground mesh and re-export it to Plasma, along with a light source. Nothing else.
Exploration and performances
To explore it, simply extract the files in the ZIP to Uru's DAT folder, and the Age will appear in the Nexus.
Beware, though: this test Age is HUGE - I really pushed Uru to its limits. I can't notice any lag on my PC, but due to the sheer density of the place I suppose older machines may lag horribly in the Age, or Uru might crash outright - I don't know.
(at worse, you can try deleting Protergen_District_horizon.prp - it will make the Age smaller, which should help with performances).
I recommend using flymode quite often, though - I'm quite aware exploring on foot is too slow and not really convenient due to the number of pits.
Why do this ?
I was thinking of how cool terrain generation in Minecraft was, so I googled the subject of procedural generation further. Then I came across an article from GPU Gems. At first I was doubtful I would be able to code a world generator, but after reading for a while I decided I might give it a try.
And in the end, it's not as complicated as it sounds - even though it requires a lot of coding
About the general shape of the terrain: I know it's not realistic, but I find flat hills depressing. So I tweaked it a bit more to add more caves, cliffs and huh... floating rocks ! Yeah !
What for ?
Now that's a good question I just coded this for the challenge, and to explore an entirely random terrain. I was also interested in knowing if Plasma could handle it (answer: it does. It just screws up my UV mapping, which looked better in Blender).
I will probably reuse it in other projects, but maybe it could be useful to builders here too. It does need some serious modifications first, though - easier import in Blender, better lighting, Level of Detail system to bring more details while increasing performances...
As always, I'm interested in any remarks or opinions you may have about it