Environment development

[angrymonkey]

I like what I've seen of the environments. Wondering if there are plans for a lot of variety - like forests with undergrowth to hide in, boulders to climb, broken and fallen trees, tall grasses. Even fields with waist high grass might be interesting if you could crouch down and hide/sneak.

[ShinyGem]

Most of these points have already been addressed, if not officially, by community maps. Right now, some of the maps are rather bare bones when it comes to sheer object number (trees, rocks, etc) simply because of performance issues (since it's not optimized, obviously), but they are getting there.

[angrymonkey]

Great. I also saw the video of the rabbit huts and the cat cities. I'm interested in how they will differentiate structures for the animal types. I think the rabbit villages should have watchtowers and maybe escape tunnels. Cat towns could have big courtyards to trap visitors in. And some species has to be able to build trojan rabbits.

[Endoperez]

Escape tunnels unerground are challenging from a technical perspective. Towers are a good idea though.

[Jaz]

Escape tunnels unerground are challenging from a technical perspective. Towers are a good idea though.

Escape tunnels underground are challenging? How?

Code in a way to disable error messages, leave a hole in the ground, model a tunnel, dump it underground, model a fake turf, dump it on top. Voila! Underground escape tunnels.

[last]

Escape tunnels unerground are challenging from a technical perspective. Towers are a good idea though.

Escape tunnels underground are challenging? How?

Code in a way to disable error messages, leave a hole in the ground, model a tunnel, dump it underground, model a fake turf, dump it on top. Voila! Underground escape tunnels.

You have no idea how OG terrains work and how are they genarated

[SteelRaven7]

Anyway, spoke with Ninjas about this a while ago on the IRC, after showing him this image:

If I remember correctly, he said that that would be a possibility in Overgrowth, but wasn't very specific on how it would be implemented. Right now though, it'd be very difficult and require modelling of the actual ground and a huge hole in the heightmap.

EDIT I suppose one could also generate the terrain from a heightmap and then edit the terrain itself and produce something similar to this.

[last]

yes this is doable right now. SteelRaven7 if you have played my old monastery map that i updated with new heightmap then you can see there that i have created almost flat terrain under some buildings on this map. So yes, you can model narrow canyons and add there some rocks to make it look better but you can't create a hole trough heightmap (terrain). Also you can create useing same technique to make "tunnels" that you cover with rocks or something like that but again you have to make custom height map for that.

[Endoperez]

Yeah, you can't really make holes in the terrain. You can lower one area to make a canyon and cover the canyon walls (where the texture is stretched horribly) with other models and/or detail texture and/or decals etc. You can model a "roof" for the canyon, a "ground" that seems to be the ground level above ground, and the "entrances" that look like holes through the ground.

So, it's either technically challenging (punching holes through terrain), or lots of work for what you get.