This is where it gets tricky. In fact, if I blow something during this process, I could blow the whole project…. and that isn’t a positive thing 
Since this game is quite expansive , even in the prototype, I need this to be as modular as possible. I was originally thinking of creating scriptable objects, but now I am thinking of just creating the base prefabs, and then we could create variants and prefab those. So, lets think about the possible base ideas.
Structures – lean-to , tent, cabin, fire, etc,….
Predators – monsters, dinosaurs, etc,…
Game – rabbits, bears, etc,….
Resources – wood, ore, twine/vines, rock, coal, bear meat, etc,….
Tools – traps, ax, saw, bucket, torch
Weapons – Spear, Sword, etc,….
I think that is it. The next part is actions which will definitely be a scriptable object. Things like Eating, Cooking, Building, Constructing, Farming Actions, etc,…. This will be quite easy, each object will contain the requirements, the time needed, and the outcome.
The next part is the UI for these things. I am thinking we can have a bar at the bottom right which will contain items on hand (Resources, Tools, Weapons) and then can be expanded to see possible actions. Right above the collapsed item bar will be a prompt line for feedback such as “I can’t put that there” and “Go to sleep?”
The first thing I need to figure out is the terrain and a way to interact with it. So as to be able to find which square we are on and react to it if needed. We dont want the player placing a tent or a fire on water and what not.
Figured that out. For now, and this probably not the best way to do it, we can get the sprite names of the tiles we are on to find out what we are on. This makes me want to generate a better map. At least a base map. I think the best course of action is to create other maps on top of the base map for things like forest, tundra, canyons, mountains, volcano and flow, and maybe rivers? Part of me thinks we can use lines of the same value generated from a perlin. But it would have to be on a seperate tilemap and like the others, check to see if the base map allows it ( cant have forest growing in the oceans ).
Now the maps are generated including octaves in the perlin noise. I sadly can’t seem to understand the concept of octaves, but it seems to be sampling from near by frequency of the same section of noise to give a more organic look versus the smooth look. If you increase the lacunarity , it begins to show the liquid look of perlin by itself. Again, I don’t really understand the math so its hard to explain exactly what I am doing.
But it does look a lot cooler with it!
Before:
After:
Jake is working on UI concepts and the base interactive. I am going to attempt to add weather and natural disasters.
Currently the weather controller is just using a rain particle system I found on unity asset store. Looks really cool, and adds some depth to the game, hopefully jake will like it too.
I have gone back to trying to add a second tilemap to overlay the base one. So far, all I am getting is a big huge white field . Debugging shows I am cycling through the tiles, and everything seems to be in place, but both tilemaps are drawing just white tiles. After a lot of trial and error, and removing the code for the second tilemap, it appears as though the material I added to it to reflect the light is reflecting straight white. This was actually my first thought when both tilemaps were being drawn, but at least now I have the main map being shown again. Obviously, I don’t understand materials that well. So with the material removed, I am going to add the second tilemap.
Boom! It works…. of course, it currently is not reflecting light so the land is glowing 24/7 , but the secondary tilemap works!
Aaaaaaand the graphics look like crap. There is five mountain, forest, and dead tree tiles. The graphics literally look like bird vomit. This opens up the idea of having deep water, lagoon/swamp, rivers, cliffs, etc,… and I think this map would be ideal to put user created items on – not positive on that as of yet, but I think that is how I will do this.
Okay…. need to get the material back on the map.
What is really annoying about this is when I first started doing the code for the second tilemap, it went completely white. I could tell it was working by muting the reflection material, but alas, i have spent seven hours over the last few days trying to figure out what went wrong.
well….. there was a directional light i had set in the scene with a 1000 level intensity, originally intended to be a lightning flash……
problem solved *cursing in vulcan*
