Proven Lands

A sci-fi survival sandbox game

[provenlandsgame]

Just fooling around with my voxel engine of Proven Lands, without the villages and animals, because, you know, Santa is coming. ;) Voxel engine still runs like a charm, 300 fps with a view distance of 100 km, to my surprise. Maybe I should talk to a publisher or so, hmmm.

By the way, also as a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_T9QJ6CeC8

[provenlandsgame]

𝗤𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗨𝗽𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗲

Hey folks

We’re sorry for the silence, but for some time we were not allowed to tell what was going on, due to a legal issue that surprised us when someone became greedy, out of stupidity, I suppose. Being a small team that only wishes to create the game they love, it hit us hard. It felt strange to not be able to talk about your own game. 

The development of Proven Lands is on hold, unfortunately. There is a silly clone out there anyway, which hurts, but this is probably how the industry works. But, it is perhaps not that bad, so we told to ourselves this morning, because numerous survival games came out recently and it’s not like they add new features to the genre, right? Like, NMS surprised us too. So maybe it is quite healthy to take our time and see what else we can add to Proven Lands in the long term, that makes is unique. I find uniqueness and to name your influences, at least to some degree, important. Let’s see how it all turns out and how much we can tell next year. Proven Lands is an amazing experience for us anyway, because, when you look back to 2013 and 2014, how much effort it took us to shape the core of the game, with the help of so many fans on tumblr (for real, it sound silly, I know, but the comments and mails helped), when it started as a roguelike, or that character design (that little astronaut, if you recall, was bigger at first), or the creatures and the voxel-based terrain engine, and also that UI, or that multi tool that felt 2013 pretty unique.

I am not sure how much we should show about Proven Lands, so see below for 2 internal videos, both from early and mid 2015. It shows well why we hoped to release the game late 2015. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6mz3q2uXQY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGur6y1UZzM

By the way, Jeffrey and I decided to work on a new game called Nimoyd in the meantime. Nimoyd is a top-down 2D sci-fi action RPG sandbox game about an alien on Earth. Nimoyd is influenced by Sid Meier’s Pirates and Mount & Blade, with combat like DOTA 2 and League of Legends, only in 2D and hand drawn. There is also a board game and a comic coming on Nimoyd, which nobody knows yet. ;) We really dig board games and to fool around with silly ideas. Sp, stay tuned and see for yourself here http://nimoyd.com and http://facebook.com/nimoyd

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Dev Update – Painting Process

Hi folks and welcome to this week’s update where I will summarise some of the thoughts, tools and techniques, that I use for paintings like the recent Slaver’s mine.

For this scene I worked with different setups: one being Photoshop CS6 on OS X and an Intuos 5 (A4) the office setup, while at home I use PS CS5 on Windows 7 and an Intuos 4 (A3). Switching between these usually is no problem.

The rough idea for the scene was to imagine the Slaver’s polyp-like mines being build into a canyon. Many pictures of this kind include one  or several persons, the main reason for this is to give people an impression for the scale of things. Before I even sketch anything I set up a bunch of very basic grids of thirds to establish the areas of interest in the picture, which would be on intersecting lines (1). This is a very common compositional technique (besides many others) it is not absolute and you don’t have to stick precisely to it, but it gives me some comfort as a point to begin from. The next step is to put in some guides for the perspective (2). I want a fairly dramatic view down into the canyon, so I put the horizon line very high outside of view. I won’t go into details of the construction since I usually don’t  put too much effort into it anyway; all I need here are really some lines to feel comfortable.

While I do the first rough sketch I arrange most details around the focal points (which I defined with the grids earlier) and start thinking about the different planes in the picture: fore-, back- and midground as I usually divide these onto different layers to make my work easier and also in terms of composition because I want to allocate certain values to each plane to make the image easy to grasp (3). Painting these values is typically the next step, beside the planes I give extra attention to the areas of interest where I make sure to have a lot of contrast. At this point I find it very useful to paint very broad and to start zooming out from time to time to get an impression of the picture as a whole.

When I am satisfied with the result I proceed to the colours. My favourite method to get a vague palette is to put a Gradient Map on top of the values (4). This is an adjustment or adjustment layer in Photoshop that assigns any colour to a scope of values that you define by positioning them on a gradient. It messes a bit with your contrast, but not necessarily in a bad way and you can simply adjust the colour’s value to match the original. One downside of this method is that you can only assign one colour per value, so I have to paint over with other colours manually, which I would do anyway.

From here I start with the most time consuming part: overpainting and adding  details, colours and so on (5). The most effort I put into the mine of course, since it is the main subject, going slightly over the top with all the funnels to convey the idea of it being a very heavy industrial complex. I change the light from inside the mine to an ominous red to focus attention where it belongs and to enrich the palette of colours. I paint some sparks, smoke and highlight to add depth to the picture and finally fine-tune some colours. Et voilà, I am done. I hope this is helpful to some, have an awesome week.

Bye bye,

Jeffrey

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Dev Update – Drones

Hello intergalactic adventurers,

it is time for another update so this week we will give you some insight into the design process of our drone companions. Some of you guys might recall that we posted an image of a building called "The Hive" not so long ago. There were some drones buzzing around the scene, because as you probably guessed already that building is closely related to these mechanical fellows acting as their home, repairing bay and control tower.

At the very beginning of the development we fantasized about a pet for the protagonist who otherwise would had have to wander around Minamata all on his own. Therefor we put a cat into a spacesuit, cause cats where big on the interwebs. Back then the idea arose, that such a companion could not only be a mere accessory, but perform useful tasks for you like scouting the area, gather resources or even engage in combat with your enemies. Although the smartest lifeform in the universe a cat would be far to proud as to help you with such mundane work, which is why we shifted the whole companion approach towards the will-less drones  that you can see in various concept art today.

When I drew the first drones there were quite some variations, from vehicles to tripodals and quadrocopters. We had to narrow all that down so that they would fit into an overall scheme. The drones had to be very flexible and able to move where ever the player went and beyond that aswell so flying was a must-have. Furthermore they had to have kind of personality for the player being able to relate to them not just as simple minions, but maybe even care for them as valuable companion in an otherwise hostile surrounding which is why we gave them certain facial features. For instance all drones share a narrow eyepiece that enables them to scan the area and they also have at least one fancy pair of winged ears because of ... aerodynamics ... and... Patlabor inspired that feature I guess.

We also took hold of the idea, that you could own several drones that served different purposes and had different strengths and weaknesses, a bit like Pokemon. With some drones having some really big guns, while others are fit to carry heavy loads, yet they all share a similar colorscheme to that of the buildings, identifying them as yours while other cultures will have their own versions of these drones.

That is all for this week, I hope you are as excited for these guys as we are. Bye bye, Jeff.

[provenlandsgame]

Underground alien civilizations in Proven Lands by couchmonaut

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Sursday Dev Update – Slavers’ Mines

Hi wonderful people,

today I'd like to give you an impression of the Slavers’ buildings and the industrial structures they use to exploit conquered planets. It is the alien race I've mentioned last time. Since buildings became more important for the gameplay in Proven Lands, it was clear to us that we had to put some effort into the habitats of the alien races as well.

We already had some really early concept (from before the Kickstarter campaign I believe), depicting the Slavers owning rather functional architecture which is build into a canyon wall. I imagine these places to be quite busy with drones swarming around, poisonous vapours being emitted from dozens of funnels and orchestras of huge machines. Because this is what Slavers do: they enslave the nice guys and exploit worlds.

Designwise the mines became darker and more convoluted, interspersed with tubes and funnels. But they did not always look that way, in fact they went through some iteration before we returned to the industrial appearance. You might recall from last week’s update, that we took inspiration from Aztecan culture, resulting in the first drafts to look much like temples instead of  factories or mines. So we decided the look to become more industrial, abandoning bright tones, giving the panels a worn look, adding rust and so on.

The outcome seems promising: the Slavers’ structures appear especially grim and dark in contrast to the bright and colourful environment of Minamata. Which suits them well since they are ominous places where the remaining Minamatans are forced into servitude and many dangers will await the player.

Hope you enjoyed and see you soon, 

Jeffrey

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Dev Update – Slavers

Hey,

I’d like to introduce another alien race: the fierce "Slavers" are your archetypical villains; they are coldblooded and cruel people, who regard Minamata and its denizens as nothing more than resources and cheap labor for the empire of their masters.

Slavers travel from galaxy to galaxy, recklessly draining the resources with heavy machinery, digging deep below planetary surfaces and dumping their industrial wastes regardless of the consequences. Their factories manufacture all kinds of drones which add to the workforce of slaves being exploited in the mines.

Very early on we started to imagine the Slavers as an amphibious, one-eyed race, reminiscent to the infamous cyclops Polyhemus from Homer's Odyssey. They match the ancient giant in terms of  malice, yet they possess great collective awareness for their own kind and ambitions.

There are some elements of Aztecan culture mixed into their appearance emphasising the slavers' archaic nature, but also their ambivalent relation towards technological advance and spirituality. Their outfits and buildings have a rather dark and bulky quality, mostly ornamented with triangular shapes and rather few, but distinctive colors which imply the individual's rank within the Slavers' hierarchies. And yes - they wear loincloth over their bodysuits, to provide them a mysterious aura.

Next week I’d like to tell a bit more about the buildings, the factories, the items of those Slavers.

See you soon, Jeffrey

[provenlandsgame]

The Hive by couchmonaut

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Sursday Dev Update -- More Biomes!

Hey,

I hope you’re fine and enjoy the summer. One of the tricky parts working on a procedural world is its configuration. Sometimes the generator simply does not spit out the cool results you hope, due to millions of million possibilities. In Proven Lands we have millions of different planets, but not millions of assets, so sometimes one planet is boring while the other is more fancy. Such tweaking can take some time. And this is what we do lately: creating biome assets, check how it works, whether it fits or is ugly, tweak and extend it.

So at the moment we work mainly on gameplay features, due to the number of buildings, items and intelligent aliens, as well as the procedural terrain variation, which is part of the current milestone, without creatures, quest points or other items in this config. 

You see the same world based on the same seed, with a bit variation in biomes and assets. The 3D assets are all modeled and painted by just one person, Anastasia, which is pretty awesome, I think.

Next time I hope to tell more about the buildings, the crafting, the drones and the camp system. Because we’d like to announce it once we feel it is more stable and complete. 

See you soon! Rafael

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Dev Update: Minatan Civilization. Woo!

Hey

We’ve been pretty busy lately with a number of things. So, let’s do another quick dev update today and keep it rolling again. Today I’d like to tell you about the Minatans aliens, alien storytelling, and what we’ve done in the meantime.

Minamata is a desert planet with steppe, hill, canyon, mountain, but also forest biomes, with flying islands, huge caves and creatures hidden deep below the planet’s surface. Minamata is your first planet, it’s where your story starts, where you develop an understanding of the Proven Lands lore. The first planet is named after a toxical disaster that occurred 1956 in Minamata, a Japanese city. It is where you land first, where your adventure starts.

The natives of Minamata are the Minatans. They are a cute hobbit-like race that lived many centuries in peace before a horrible war killed 99% of their race and intoxicated their planet. Yes, Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä plays a certain role in that story. Without spoiling things: Your arrival on this planet, either as a boy or girl, is nothing special nor important to them. You are an everyday dude (or dudeness?) without scientic or any special education, actually a teenager. You are more Alice in Wonderland than the common survivor educated in the arts of crafting and block digging, and you wonder what happened to you. What is left of Minamata’s once golden civ is divided in small apocalyptic villages — with Hobbit and Moebius influences — scattered across the planet’s surface and below, for a dangerous reason. Those Minatans look cute, but they have pointy industrial age weapons, and you have laser beams, and other alien races have lasers too. They hate foreigners, but if you are nice, you might find a few new friends.

Jeffrey and I had a long time ago quite a discussion on how these aliens should be in our little game, on what base, what art, what Earth culture? For instance, why doing a distinct story based alien race at all? There are dozens of procedural open world games out there without specific stories orbitting a particular race or place, right? Starbound is a good example. Now, this is where we’d like to make a difference, because I feel tired of huge but random worlds. Good looking procedural worlds are awesome, no doubt about that. But after 10h into it I don’t care about the graphics and randomness anymore, but gameplay and story (this is where I’m eager to see whether No Man’s Sky will deliver or not, btw). Playing Witcher 3, for instance, felt awesome at first and then later to me, because of the graphics at the beginning, but once I got used to the graphics, I appreciated the stories and the lore even more. I’ve read articles where guys started to jump from quest to quest, taking less and less part in the game’s world, though dozens of artists put so much effort in making it so nice. Skyrim was the same to me. I think it is just natural to huge worlds, and I guess No Man’s Sky will be like that, but we’d like that you interact and care about other intelligent entities in the game. And so, being an open world brat, I wondered how we should make the aliens more cool.

We decided to have less civilizations, but with more caution and love. All aliens civs are part of a faction and class system which decides their development level. Stone age aliens would be great and will come, but we lack the funding to do them right now, for instance (maybe after the release, depending on how it goes?? dunno). And there is a main story that drives the universe, a faction war with many small wars and lots of trouble. The Minatans will be important to you and your story, because they will — through their unique tragic fate — introduce you to the Proven Lands lore. And I hope you like them as much as we do (kudos to Anastasia, our 3D designer).

And what happenend in the meantime? A number of things. Jeffrey is now doing lot of 2D everyday work as well as more player item concepts (a good ‘ol Western chair, of course, and a Dune-like desert suit). Anastasia is creating new ground textures and assets, which I use for the new biomes; even though there are some distinct biomes, all biomes have numerous variations. At the same time she jumps from time to time back to character design. I, on the other side, am working on gameplay, gameplay, gameplay. Building interaction, environmental control, crafting, this sort of time consuming stuff. I don’t know when I’ll show more of that, but I will when it’s done. And this leads to a good and fair question I get from time to time. When is our game done? We love our little game, that’s why we take our time, among other obvious reasons such as team size and budget limits. We are a tiny team, but working hard and full time on it, so, you know, we make it one step at the time. I think the best is to promise that the game is done when it’s done (yea, yea).

Alright. I hope you’re fine. It’s 38°C here. See you soon! Rafael

[provenlandsgame]

This week I’d like to show a few new trees for the forests and more swampy areas, as well as the rain effect and the meteorite shower effect. The rain is barely seen in this shot, and the meteorite will damage the voxel terrain every time they hit the ground soon, but I hope you like this early demos anyway ;)

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Sursday Dev Update: Weather System and Slicing Tool

Hey

Today I’d like to show you two new effects: the storm system, which is part of the weather system, as well as the “slicing tool”, as we call it, which we use for all kind of damages in the game.

A weather system is a bit tricky for a voxel-based 3D world, in particular if there could be sort of co-op multiplayer in the future (if), so we decided to do a nice but simple rain and storm system first, and then upgrade it later, maybe, perhaps, depending on how it feels in the game to you and to us later.

By “storm” I’ve always dreamt of both, a sand storm like in “Dune”, and an “ionic storm” that is more than a lightning storm. I will show rain, meteorites and destruction in the next updates. 

Another super neat effect is the slicing. It allows us to slice a tree after you’ve killed it, or to break a rock in five parts after you destroyed it, only as an effect for now. The same goes to all animals, which we will probably deactivate for animals (so you can mod it yourself), because we plan to not allow it by default. Or we will see how it turns out because it opens new gameplay mechanics, surprisingly. Right now the slicing tool is an ordinary “cut”, as you can see above, but soon it will be that automatic slicing into pieces. I also like the idea of sort of a “saw effect” (like using your broadsword in Secret of Mana for cutting the grass) – like using a scythe. And I must confess that it is darn fun to cut and slice everything in front of you. Work in progress though.

But how does the weather system works in the game, actually? Every chunk is part of a region and has a biome type. The region and biome type define the current weather in that chunk. In the desert in most cases that would be “sunny”, but sometimes a meteroite shower storm or ionic storm crosses your picknick plans, and once you leave that stormy chunk, or if the storm is over, you can avoid the weather. Basically, it means that the weather system is simple, but dynamic. The storm is moving from one chunk to another as well. And yes, a meteorite inflicts damage to the voxel terrain.

Banana, Rafaelio

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Dev Update: Procedural Traits and Diplomacy

Hey

Game devs talk with pleasure about “believable” this-and-that, characters, worlds, underwear. So how to create believable characters without a big budget? I often thought of the Proven Lands character system as somehow procedural, maybe because it was originally meant to be a roguelike. By procedural I don’t mean the graphics, the models, the textures but the character stats, traits, stories, history, in good ‘ol roguelike fashion.

A typical (old school) roguelike base on traits. By “traits” I mean traits like “hungry”, “sleeping” or “toxicated”, but also “friendly” or “experienced in laser pew pew”. The Sims base on traits too, btw.

When you create a new character, what we like to do is to let you choose between “constant character traits” such as “human”, “firefighter” or “cosplayer”. All constant traits give you certain bonus or malus. We could call it “classes” sometimes, but not always.

The second category of traits are “dynamic traits” or “moods”. These are traits such as “fever”, “lunatic” or “pregnant”, or “wounded”. You can stack some of them up to five. For instance, a wound has a chance to grow to fever, but five wounds will certainly cause death soon. When you fight an enemy, if he hits you, you loose health points, but you might also get a “wounded” trait, if it was a critical hit. A “wounded” trait is like an open wound, and you need to figure out what to do next. Combat buffs are such dynamic traits as well. Even if you die, you don’t die just like that -- there’s a “dead” trait that can be caused by many other traits by a probability of x %.

The last category of traits are the so called “diplomacy traits”. Technically speaking, these are character traits, but they appear a bit different in the game, even though they act like character traits in relation to other characters.

The diplomacy system of Proven Lands base on a value range between “ally” and “hostile”. You have a diplomacy rating to everyone and everything intelligent in the world. This makes modding so awesome. For instance, predator animals are hostile to you while cute birds are friendly. The sheep likes the wolf, while the wolf hates the sheep, because sheep doesn’t hate anyone *period*. If the wolf hates the sheep, the sheep will run away if it’s too weak to defend itself, where the wolf will attack the sheep on sight. If the wolf is hungry, its diplomacy rating gets a big malus so it attacks more frequent. And so on. I believe it is a simple, but powerful and dynamic system.

Proven Lands is by far not as complex as Dwarf Fortress, but I hope you like how we try to add some depth to your character, maybe in a more procedural or dynamic way than many other games. The idea was to give depth to the world and characters with a tiny team, by being smart, creative, systemic. So is the diplomacy mechanics a system of its own. But once you get how the system “cascades” between you, regions, villages and individuals, it is hopefully more interesting than the usual enemy spawning or scripting.

Alrighty. I hope you enjoyed this tiny mechanics introduction. So what did we do in the meantime? A lot of background work, actually. Jeffrey added more variation to the space suits and alien concepts. We will show more of then when we are done with. We had some fun with the new insect animations. And… Anastasia works on more of these fantastic trees. Do you remember those old blue trees in our game? We finally found time to add more of them. I’d love to work on the new ground textures as well. And I hope to find some time to show some of those new effects next week.

Five-by-five, Rafael

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Dev Update: Manga and Pixel Art Trees

Hi

Trees are fundamental to our understanding of forests, but also to the way how we look at deserts, swamps and even cities, right? But in games, trees are somehow underrated. Trees become often “okay-ish” like in DOTA, a number of big bushes that fill the space with some “green”. DOTA is a great game but those trees? Well. That’s why Proven Lands is more influenced by anime, comics, manga and pixel art plants and trees.

Whenever the creative or art directors create an immersive natural environment, trees seem to be the last thing they think of, while we, as gamers, constantly experience trees and plants in games. What is also interesting is that art directors seem to spend more time on foliage and plants than actual trees. A good trick to avoid trees is sometimes, like in the film Croods or early Proven Lands, to create big foliage and plants, and then just indicating huge tree barks in the background.  

For Proven Lands I did check numerous tree styles and tree models over the last months, but I never felt comfortable when I looked at the common SpeedTree leaf-branch-moving tree. Most tree designs are semi-realistic to realistic, even in less realistic games (DOTA, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons or Borderlands) or films (Croods or Up). You fill the environment with trees because other parts are more important. If we believe that Proven Lands is influenced by Moebius and Ghibli Studios and films like Nausicaä, DayZ-like trees with toonish barks and leaves would be less cool.

However, last year we decided to go for mushroom trees first, like many other art directors before us, just to fill the terrain with nice plants, because we knew that realistic leaf-trees wouldn’t be our thing. It turned out also that the African desert and steppe show many interesting trees that are not the common American-European oak-ish tree thing, so we wanted to take our time for that. And due to our tiny team and the funding and planning issues last year, we took our time to think about that.

I realized two things working on trees. Firstly, anime, comics, cartoons and manga have more interesting tree designs for a cartoon-ish style game like ours. Secondly, pixel art games, whether Mario Bros. or Secret of Mana (which I love, btw), or Starbound, have more in common with comics and manga when it comes to trees and plants, and this too is important for us.

So once this was clear, Jeffrey and Anastasia developed a new tree style that completes the tree environment together with those big shroomy plants. It took us a while, and it drove Anastasia crazy, but I think it was worth it. Today it seems so obvious and easy, but it was quite a ride to realize that the casual SpeedTree tree gave us headaches for a reason. 

In the meantime, we also added more concept variation to the aliens, the plants and the drones. We will show more about that in the next few months. We’ve been also working on effects such as laser beams, item buffs like “heal” and the weather system which I will show you next week, I think. I was a bit distracted by a legal dispute that is going on for months now. Yeaa. An annoying, unfair, disappointing topic. But we hope it ends soon. However, I found time to add more gameplay features to the game, as well as optimizing the voxel engine a bit for the first time in months. It became interesting once I realized that the creating of the voxel data itself (not the extraction of polygons out of voxel data; see my last blog posts here for voxel tech) is the slowest part. This is good because it shows that the engine might work pretty well on an average crappy 2-core machine with an average graphic card too, once the voxel data generation is optimized. Because performance matters. See you next week!

Shew shew, Rafael

[btxsqdr]

This Thursday I’d love to show some games, which are at the A MAZE Game Festival. Moöööre games later ᕙ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ᕗ Indie! Woo!

[btxsqdr]

Trees and laser beams :D

[provenlandsgame]

Sursday Update: Zee Voxel Engine – Marching Cubes and View Distance

Hey

Rafael here. Last weekend I’ve met Oskar (hey there!), the creator of that cool city block demo, for a coffee, and we talked a bit about the voxel engine of Proven Lands. Great guy, btw. So let’s talk about voxels a bit too.

The foundation of our engine is, as for Minecraft and other voxel games, the Marching Cubes algorithm. This algorithm was first published in 1987 for extracting a polygonal mesh from voxels (a 3D discrete scalar field). If you want to learn about voxels, see my blog on voxel data, or if you are into Marching Cubes, better check the web because I cannot cover the whole topic in a dev blog post. 

In short, Marchin Cubes is a clever way to “extract” meshes from a “cloud of dots”, so to speak. It has deep scientifically roots like visualisation of brains. It was improved a few times since then. The voxel engine “Voxel Farm” of EverQuest Next used Marching Cubes at the beginning, too, before its creator, Miguel, decided to use Dual Contouring, if I’m not mistaken, which is basically a better looking algorithm. The bad thing about Marching Cubes though is that it was patented until 2005. Yep, thank you science. So until 2005 it was expensive or even forbidden to use it sometimes. So no games touched it really, and that’s why games like Infiniminer probably appeared first after 2005– and then voxel things became the next big thing for some Minecraft reason.

Basically, what you do in Marching Cubes you “march” through the data and create cube parts. It’s like: This could be the top of the polygon, this the left side, this is small corner there, and so on It is one of the reasons why nearly all voxel based games like StarForge start with a low view distance. They do it because the polygons are created through such “marching” on the CPU, which takes time. A world based on voxel data is probably the future, whether in polygons or on a hardware-based voxel level, but today on our crappy primitive machines it takes minutes to create huge worlds. So what do we do in order to create an okay-ish huge scene? How to get a huge view distance?

We optimise the loader, the generator, the data structure. For instance, we create a Level of detail-based (LOD) terrain system. That’s why trees and whole mountains flicker in the background in many games. The closer you are to the player, the higher the resolution of the terrain. The further away you are, the rougher the terrain and the bigger the area you render. How do I know what to render and how close I am? You use an “octree” data structure. Octree is the 3D equivalent of a quadtree, which is used in AI programming, for instance. You “walk” through the tree until you hit the bottom level of one node and then you render it. How do I know what the bottom level is? Every node has an LOD ID. If LOD 0 is the player and LOD 8 is 16 km away. If you render all LOD 1 nodes it is clear that you cannot render LOD 2 or 3 within the same area, because LOD 2 is bigger than LOD 1 and consists of all LOD 0 and LOD 1 nodes, respectively. So when the player moves, you determine the position of LOD 0 all the time and adjust the surrounding “terrain meshes” to it by “walking” through the octree again until you hit the bottom level that has to be rendered. If it’s too much in a quick post, see here for a nice video on how LOD works in general, without knowing their engine: No Man’s Sky, a different game, gameplay and engine though, shows pretty well how this works here.

It is no rocket science, it is pretty known to engineers working on huge scenes or planets, but there’s one downside for Proven Lands however. Doing such a LOD system for a non-voxel based game is already complicated and expensive (in terms of performance, math and coding magic). But for voxel engines it is rare. It is so rare that, as far as I know, only one PhD dissertation exists on that topic until today. The reason are the cracks (or “holes”) between LOD terrain meshes based on voxel data. Due to the voxel nature of the terrain, there is a high chance that you find tiny cracks between the LOD’s, so your scene is filled with cracks. There are some tricks for normal terrain like “skirts” that help, but if we imagine complex voxel-based overhangs and caves, those solutions won’t help you anymore due to the mesh complexity of some caves or pillars. In Landmark you would have holes in every house, for instance. So the (talented) creator of the C4 engine proposed to create an LOD 0.5 between LOD 0 and LOD 1 which works basically like a “zipper” or like glue, called it Transvoxel algorithm and wrote his dissertation about it. In that aspect Minecraft’s terrain is more simple compared to all Landmark’s out there, because in a Minecraft-like game you are less affected by LOD holes or issues.

Now, back to our little game, what does it mean to us? Being the only coder here, and doing many other things at the same time *cough*, means we need to be hyper pragmatic. There’s plenty of room for improvements, not only lighting or loading time. But what we have already is a nice looking terrain and a hopefully interesting view distance of 16 to 32 km at an altitude of 10 m (it is higher the higher the altitude). It is not optimized yet, but we’re on it.

For as long you use the top-down camera everything is fine Diablo 3-Don’t Starve-style, but if you turn the camera in a cave or on a high flying island, I thought I’d like to give us that emotion of being truly alone in the desert, on a huge planet, with a huge view distance -- like Sparth’s art. At some point we hope to add vehicles and aircrafts to the game too. So let’s see how it goes.

Cheers, Rafael