Gamedev on Steven's blog

3D Autotiling pt. 1: Basic WFC

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I don’t think I would have become interested in shooters if it weren’t for Halo 3’s forge mode. I probably logged 1000 hours in Minecraft when I was a kid (and learned Java because of it!). Games that let you make stuff are the best. Making games is even better. After a few years focusing on my career in network programming I decided to revisit games, this time looking at 3D.

3D Autotiling pt. 2: Expanding and Optimizing

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the last post we were able to randomly generate “correct” looking 3D shapes. However, my goal was something that a user or game developer could create levels with. Let’s look at our requirements:

The user should have direct control of the generation. BorisTheBrave describes calls this “Driven WFC”.
We need a lot of tiles. That would take a lot of time to model for a game developer. This isn’t totally avoidable, but we can optimize our workflow.
If the user is going to interact with this, the algorithm for solving the generation needs to be fast. Our naive implementation needs a major upgrade.

Driving WFC

Initial Constraint

Our method of “driving” WFC will be specifying which cells aren’t empty as an initial contraint.

Faking Buoyancy

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

During the intro to a game I (perodically) work on, the player starts on a pirate ship. Realistic water doesn’t fit the style, and scroling textures on a big plane looked pretty boring. To make things a bit angrier I needed intense waves, and I needed those waved to actually affect the world.

Waves

To keep it simple, I just did procedural heightmap; i.e. set the vertical coorinate to be a function of the horizontal position and time.

Non-Destructive Terrain Editor

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am not a good artist. One of the reason 3D is a bit more attractive to me is that I can usually build something rather than draw it or sculpt it. Digital art gives you an “undo” button, but being able to undo or redo things out of order makes it even easier to experiment.

Most of the terrain tools out there have a destructive workflow. Using various brushes, you write directly to a heightmap. Including the concept of “layers” can help here, but I want something closer to modeling.

Triplanar with Deep Parallax in Godot

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Triplanar mapping is already expensive, and multiplying that by the samples for paralax occlusion mapping is probably a bad idea. It was fun to implement this anyway, even if I don’t use it in a game.

In my current WFC prototypes, I’m re-using models and rotating them. At some point I’ll need to handle also transforming the UVs based on the rotation of the tiles’ models, but for now triplanar mapping is a quick way to get an idea of how things might look.