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Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP)

For the past few days I've been working on this in a separate studio file and I thought I'd share the progress here. It's still very early on, with biome or feature placement yet, but the generation itself is coming along better than I imagined.

In each image, a 5x5 grid of generated islands is shown. Their colors indicate their shape type.

The first image is when I finished the rough shape types, which are:

- Red: Random shapes placed and rotated near the center
- Yellow: Three medium sized islands
- Green: Four or more small islands
- Teal: A central part with 2 other parts offset randomly from it, making shapes like u, n, and s.
- Blue: A ring with varying thickness

Each shape can vary in height and also size. The first picture has "small" islands, but there are also medium and large sizes. The height and size are chosen separately, so there can be large flat islands, or super tall small islands.

After I was satisfied with the shapes and basic height, I made it so some islands can have "cliffs" instead of edges, like the island in the 2nd image.

Then I added another step to generation which can add random higher levels to the terrain offset from a base part of the island, which is something I usually do when manually building islands to add more variation. (Shown in 3rd pic kind of)

In the fourth image I started adding the feature placements for the island, such as grass layers, locations for trees and rocks to spawn (brown and black squares), and areas where ground features can be placed (large green squares). For now, these are uncolored and barebones, since the island's biome will be determined after its initial generation. (For example if its an icy biome, it would generate pine trees and change the grass to snow, and generate snow piles)

Earlier today I also added an "extreme" modifier to the island generation which can sometimes happen, which causes spike-like hills to form like in the final 2 pics

Right now I'm working on adding small caves, waterfall spawns, spots for mini structures, and lakes to the generation, then I'll be adding the biome types. I'm super excited for how they'll turn out at the end cause I really didn't expect them to be able to look this good, before I started I was assuming at best they'd be a large flat area with a few trees lol


Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP) Procedural Island Generation for the Dark Sea (WIP)

Comments

Cool but annoying when you solo and it takes 5 mins to climb a super tall island and you can only carry 2 chest at a time

Kid49ers X

This is actually really goddamn cool, Nice work!

Rich Guy

Im slightly concerned for the lag in all of this I am curious about the optimization of everything regarding this

Wifty

this is awesome, i love these interesting posts and first looks at new content, even if it’s kind of few and far between. hoping this update drops soon 👍

supertroopa

Good luck adding the caves! That sounds like it might be a bit annoying to add.

Mortomi Cinnamonbun

I like the variety, can’t wait to see 👍

Trisha

Damn i wonder are they gonna look normal-ish or absolutely deserted

Sajbran

I hope we get things like burning forests or frozen wastelands as biomes

Eclipse

recommended but not needed, ethan.

[archived]

This looks insane, how do people even do this?!

Sanek_Gaming

Will Dark Sea need multiple players? Crews are stats with cosmetics right now, so will that change? It would be hard sharing the loot otherwise.

Ethan Chen

The Dark Sea is calling my name i can feel it already

Aditya Banks

they dont run the spawn functions until you are in the dark seas. im assuming they also quickly unload, to mimic the randomness of the dark seas and to reduce too many spawning at once.

Maple

wow, aos modular features never ceases to surprise me. very excited to see how there will turn out with texture and detail, cant wait to explore the dark seas!

Maple

but how would this work? surely doing it in a normal server with all people inside it would cause absurd amounts of lag, aswell as issues. it should be a separate server, once you are far enough in

myra

amazing inspiration. this update will easily give ao the replayability it needs..

myra

I really like and possibly even prefer this style of post, it’s quite interesting to see how the game works from the inside

Randomness

swag

TheZestfall 1st

These look better than me seeing Taylor Swift up next on my Spotify playlist. Can't wait to explore them.

The Big Cheese

The hype is real!

Quake

LIT keep working vetex this is nutty

Dev

This looks Awesome! Can't wait for the next update!

SuperNinjaDan1

ebic

Jaybird0413

ik the colors are meant to be stand ins but i think the idea of an island with purple or green stone cliffs would be trippy as hell and perfect for the dark sea it sounds like an urban legend, right? "the island with green cliffs"

Redsisco

interesting

Popsickle

Nevermind I’m not the first 🥲

PrimusAtomix

First! But nice job Vetex! Giving us the good stuff as per usual!

PrimusAtomix

This is some cool stuff

Divanochi


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