Here's a screeny from a year ago of a proof of concept randomly generated 'dungeon'
Screenshot link
Youtube video navigating the inside of the dungeon with a test 'inverse' light source
Youtube link
Project website with a downloadable terrain demo.
http://thronesanddominions.net/
Terrain demo
screenshot
This generates a terrain of the final size in the game, approx 4000km x 4000km. The player move speed starts off rather slow, you can increase or decrease with the = and - keys. Also everything seems slowed down just because there are no features to give a sense of scale. The smallest local terrain grid is 128x128 meters and the view distance is out to a few hundred km so those far mountain peaks are very very far away and very very tall. The terrain is not fine-tuned in this demo to any reasonable level it was just a quick snapshot of my project. The peaks are much higher than everest and there are some spires that hit an asymptote and go up almost indefinitely. There are some features visible in the demo like perfectly flat plain areas. This was accomplished by a combination of perlin noise and voronoi regions with varying thresholds. Terrain generates on the fly and loaded into a view centered geometry clipmap.
The demo is using OpenGL immediate mode rendering with a render function over 500 lines long. Since this early experiment I have started using modern OpenGL 3.0+ which should increase performance enormously. I have also coded GUI and menu/game mode switching since this demo.
Right now I'm working on what will hopefully be the final object management code. The goal is to run the game on a sort of MainMemory Database where all object fields are stored contiguously to be as cache friendly as possible (ie, I could update all object positions without actually having to touch the rest of the object data)
Most 'mobiles' (enemies etc.) will be billboard sprites (either impostor-rendered in-game or pre-rendered in Blender) with a few frames of animation a-la Daggerfall. I'm trying to steer clear of the uncanny valley here.
The next immediate goal is a playable alpha demo where player starts in a dungeon and has to fight their way out. Featuring swords, torches, ropes and grappling hooks
Further goals:
-Terrain rendering able to accurately reproduce forest environments and watersheds with line of sight up to several hundred KM. Huge amounts of procedural generation & LOD levels will be used.
-More dungeons, baddies and items to find.
-16-32 player simultaneous
-Civilizations, procedurally generated art & culture using base historical motifs as sources & inspirations
A further goal is to introduce politics & large scale warfare. Oh, I also will be composing a variety of situational music to help with the atmosphere.
And if anyone has a spare $15k laying around I'll quit my job and work on this full time
(not massive, something like 8-16 players) gonna have to wait a few years
