I just started to research and experiment for our next project.
Our game-designer insisted that all the action shall take place in an infinite and seamless 3D world - well, thats something that can bring nightmares to poor programmers like me when you hear it.
After some tests with a more traditional tile-based system (pre-constructed 3D meshes) i came up with the following idea:
Lets imagine a 4x4 grid of terrain pieces. Each terrain will be defined by a heightmap, a splatmap and some detail maps wich describe where foliage is placed. Nothing new so far, just a simple terrain system.
The heightmap will be calculated from a rather simple Perlin Noise script and textured based on height and slope of the resulting terrain.
Now we are developing in Unity3D and also with the free Indie-version - this means not really much graphical highlights out of the box, and to be honest - the terrain system itself is a bit outdated too. Tough the community is constantly trying to push those boundaries, and cause of this (and countless hours of research) i found some nice improvements like for example some shader replacements wich enabled the use of normal maps on the terrain.
I took some screenshots from the first tests:
Nearly everything in there is procedurally computed at runtime.
The heightmap and texture distribution on the terrain aswell as the skybox ( with animated clouds ).
Just cause it adds to the beauty i also used a water-shader i already improved during the development of our first game and some lens-flares (i know, totally unrealistic and over-used, but it just looks pretty =P )
I am quite proud how it turned out... Keep in mind this is just a couple of days work (and most of the time research on different terrain generation techniques and failed experiments).
You can already walk endless in any direction ( currently some lag occurs while calculating the new terrains but i am quite sure that this can be solved, i am quite new to the concept of co-routines but so far the lag is already acceptable).
The game itself isnt even announced yet in any form, so i cant talk about what the player will do in there. But the framework i am building right now will enable player-generated worlds ( you set the world on a macro scale, micro scale will get generated automatically).
Well, hope you enjoyed the pics as much as i do rigth now...
