Hello everyone!
We never stop trying to make the most out of the voxel-based world of Foundry. With the introduction of Lava Caves we already brought some more gameplay content underground. But there is still a lot of untouched terrain between the surface and them. As mentioned in an earlier Foundry Friday we are currently experimenting with adding some exploration mechanics. Combining these two thoughts there seems to be a logical consequence: Caves!
Cave Entrance
Worms don’t just like apples
All of the world generation in Foundry is noise-based and thus the cave generation needs to be as well. For this we use so-called “pseudorandom noises” that appear statistically random, but are produced by a deterministic process. So passing in a value into the noise function will always lead to the same output value. Otherwise playing Foundry wouldn’t be much fun when the world changes every time you load your game.
At first glance a noise (visualized above) doesn't seem special, but it can be a very powerful tool for procedural generation.
Our caves are created with the help of “Perlin Worms”, a method that is based on using a Perlin Noise, which is a pseudorandom noise as mentioned above. Using these can give the caves some sort of slithering effect, making you think a worm just passed through and ate away the terrain. If you are interested in more mathematical details about Perlin Worms, here is a link to a site that i found helpful and well explained: Link
Let’s look at a video! But keep in mind that everything is still WIP. You might spot some new rarities in these images. Maybe our robot can find some use for them?
Inventory UI Experiments
Meanwhile others in our team have been experimenting with a new inventory and crafting frame. Some of the upcoming features require a bit of a rework for the inventory frame itself, and therefore we have decided to try overhaul the whole thing a bit. User experience about the crafting frame being tied to the inventory frame was always a bit awkward, so we're trying to make it into a single frame and increase the quality as a whole. Here's a first image:
Note that this is still work in progress! Also the additional headers inside the crafting frame can be toggled with the button on the top right above, so you can have it as compact as it previously was. But this should help new players finding their preferred crafting buttons faster.
We're sharing this with you early so that we can have your feedback influence the process, please let us know what you think!
And that's it for today!
-lxi
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/983870/FOUNDRY/