Couple of additional things I worked on this weekend to remove friction from making new Places: terrain sculpting and a better parameter menu.
The terrain in Places is a basic height mapped one. So far I’ve painted the height map by hand in a painting application and because of this, it has been very slow to iterate on it. Paint something, launch Places, see how it looks and repeat. To alleviate this, I added support for height map hotloading some time ago and this removed the need to launch Places over and over again. But still it required extra effort to mentally map a brush stroke on height map texture to a terrain feature in Places.
So in attempt to move towards a more WYSIWYG style of editing I implemented basic height map sculpting support in Places. It’s very simple with basic raise, lower and smooth brushes but already much better than the previous method.
The second thing I added was a better menu for tweaking parameters such as fog and terrain in real-time while inside Places. Previously I had an ad-hoc menu for a few parameters but it was limited and more importantly it was a major pain to add new parameters to it. This required calculating screen coordinates for positioning and boilerplate code. The rest of the parameters were in configuration files edited with a text editor.
After thinking about it for a while I decided to go with a tree view style menu for this as it would completely eliminate the need to position buttons and sliders on screen. It’s also compact, organized and you can quickly open and close sub-menus.
After implementing it, it has been super easy to add new parameters and actions inside it. Usually all it takes is a single line of copy paste code. I’m still moving parameters from configuration files to the new UI but it’s already a clear win in terms of lower friction in making system parameters configurable and tweaking those parameters while in Places.
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