First post!
A bit of background: I have an idea for a game world that takes the elements of all the RPGs that I enjoy – with the ability to adapt the game engine/world to suit every possible type of game. The engine will (hopefully) work with programmable gravity, fully self-generating, self-aware, adaptable and deformable terrain, erosion, regenerating plantlife, programmable craftable world pieces and items (eg, you build a house, the house stays there, but is also deformable, you build a tank, the tank will deform the ground it drives on), and many more features.
At the moment the logic is being done in Python, as it’s a fairly easy language to rapidly do calculations with and is multi-platform. I will probably port the game engine (but not the server side) to c++ eventually, but for now python and pygame are adequate for my needs.
Anyway, last night I managed to get the procedural generation of the terrain heightmap working – it still needs a bit of tweaking to get more natural continents, but the first drafts are looking good. I’m now working on the transition from 2D heightmap to 3D generated terrain. My biggest hurdle is the sheer amount of memory required for a 10km square of terrain – and this world must be HUGE to accomplish my goals (Think bigger than Azeroth!).
To do:
- Natural-looking water source placement with erosion – past and present.
- Plantlife based on the water sources and ground type
- A basic character model to start exploring with