I’ve been tweaking our new grass renderer a little bit and asking myself if I can increase the grass draw distance without ruining the overall performance. I came up with an unique solution by decreasing the amount of rendered grass, having in mind maximum grass distance and current camera position.

New LOD logic allows subtle decrease of rendered grass meshes over the distance between the player and the final render distance. With this system we can now increase the render distance and allows us to add more content into the world of Floatlands

Finally I set out to improve the tools for terrain. It’s not much, but I did a function for local min/max search and slope of terrain. Local maximums should be useful for spawning bigger objects that need visibility. Local minimums could be useful for resources that need to be more hidden from the player.

To further enhance the world we’ll add tiny critters that will roam around the environment. Critters will be friendly animals or mechanical creatures that will move around specific territories. For example you’ll encounter turtles near the sea/shore line, chickens near villages etc. If you decide to kill the critter, there will be a chance that it will drop loot or crafting materials. Although, what kind of heartless person could possibly kill a tiny cute crab dragging around a tin can house.