The page has just turned on the calendar, which means it is time for a new edition of Dinolords Monthly where we take a look at some of the things that have been going on in the game. We are still hard at work, and because of some things coming up in the near future, this edition will be a little shorter than usual - let us call it a Monthly Lite.
This month we are going to check out some improvements on some visual aspects of the terrain, so let us take a dip and touch some grass!
The water was in dire need of some attention, it was based on one of our first quick solutions of just adding a shader that looked a little like water to a flat plane. And while it served the purpose of conveying that it was in fact water, it did not really meet the standards of the visual quality we want for the game.
So after some work and fiddling, we have drastically improved how the water itself looks - just have a look at these before and after screenshots: There are still some additional details about the water that are still in the works, which includes some dynamic waves that warp around the edge and terrain dynamically, making the waterline look much more like water and less like Z-fighting. There’s also some better foam in the works, but all in all it already feels like a 1000% improvement when compared to before.
We have been looking at grass a lot lately. Tall grass, short grass, green grass, brown grass, soft grass, coarse grass, well-kept grass, wild grass, lush grass, there are so many variables to play around with when it comes to the green narrow-leaved plant that grows everywhere.
Kacper, our technical artist, has made a great in-depth post over on the-site-formally-known-as-twitter, where he showcases some of the features of the new grass system for Dinolords, you should go there and check it out in detail but here are some of the highlights. The density and size of the grass can now be manipulated via layers where noise can be used to make the grass look a lot more visually interesting and less uniform.
Wind effects have been improved drastically, and now affects both the grass and the small foliage as well.
Grass samples coloir from the terrain texture underneath, meaning we can make more dynamic areas with dry grass or swamplands and much more.
Stamps can be placed that affect density and size to make clearings around buildings and the like much more natural looking where we previously just removed the grass from the footprint of a building, we can now fade the height smoothly.
Grass can be automatically removed from textures where we don’t want it to grow like on paths, sand, rocks etc.
And the grass now responds to the lord and units walking over it, where it gets pushed down and slowly raises back up! So many cool grassy things!
That was it for this ‘lite’ edition of Dinolords Monthly.
As per usual, if you are not there already, we have a discord you can join here, where we chat a little more informally about what is going on and we answer any questions that might pop up.
-panxter