Author: Yolan
Perf Matters
Updates have been slow for the last few weeks. I was not satisfied with the performance of terrain painting. After a few weeks of work progress has been made. The result? I completely replaced the terrain editing and painting systems with compute shaders. The next big performance boundary is vegetation generation.
–
For an end of year project I decided to build something a little bigger. I wanted to put Terrain Builder to the test to design a terrain that would be used in a Unity project. The project went well and resulted in the background image seen here.
My daughter’s been begging me to add snow to the app. We had our first snow last week so it seemed like a good time to work on expanding weather and snow features. The latest build adds snow as well as animated transitions between seasons.
A lot of changes went in this weekend.
After discussions on discord I decided to throw in a oil paint effect. This still needs tweaking and exposing of parameters, but overall I like the look.
Over the weekend I created a first look video of UHD gameplay. It exposed a few bugs that need to get fixed, but was a good first attempt.
A Newish Project
Over Thanksgiving this year I decided to work on a new project. I wanted to do something a little different from my other projects to give myself a break. With COVID running rampant I decided what better project than something to create places to visit.
Thanksgiving Results
By the end of Thanksgiving I had something functional that was fun to use. I had an app that runs on almost anything with a pen. The app was performant on a Galaxy Note 8 as well as a MS Surface Pro X, but that wasn’t enough.
UHD First Person
Now that I could build my terrains I wanted to be able to walk around them. To do this I decided to add an extra quality bar: UHD. The results are already looking great.