Since the last dev log, I’ve mostly been working on the visual side of GeoSim and trying to make the environment feel less like a bunch of basic geometry.
I started by adding a proper sky to the scene. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the sky settings until I got something I was happy with. It makes a pretty big difference compared to having a plain black background.
After that I moved on to clouds. I wanted something more interesting than just putting a few transparent cloud textures in the sky, so I ended up implementing procedural volumetric clouds using a 3D noise texture and ray marching using GLSL. The clouds have multiple layers of procedural noise to control their shape and detail, along with a separate procedural mask to give them a more natural form. I also added some basic volumetric lighting so they react to the sun and ambient light instead of just looking like white blobs.
The clouds are also animated, so the volume slowly moves through the sky rather than staying completely static. Getting them to actually look good took quite a bit of experimenting with the different settings like density, coverage, etc.
Once I had the clouds looking good, I ran into a problem I was pretty much expecting which was reduced performance. Well the performance wasn’t really good to begin with and the clouds made it worse. So I spent some time optimizing the clouds and managed to get a pretty significant performance improvement without sacrificing the looks too much.
After that, I decided to optimize the buildings too while I was at it. Before, the way I was generating building geometry was doing a lot more work than necessary, so I implemented geometry batching. This ended up making the performance a whole lot better.
At this point the project has a good looking sky, clouds and is pretty performant. So next I want improve the appearance of the buildings. Right now they still look like like blocks so I want to start using the data I am pulling to generate things like windows, entrances, balconies, and other architectural details when the information is available. For buildings where that information isn’t available, I want to procedurally generate the details based on the building’s shape, type, etc. I also want to improve the building materials and add textures so that different buildings feel less alike and then I’ll move to roofs, roads, and terrain and also stuff like trees and then simulating stuff like floods.