Since the last dev log, I’ve mostly been working on improving the appearance and detail of the buildings in GeoSim.
I started by working on procedural textures for the building materials. Instead of having buildings use mostly flat colors, I added procedural textures for things like brick, concrete, plaster, metal, and glass. I also added stuff like roughness maps so the different materials react to lighting differently. I did this to make the buildings feel more varied without having to rely on a huge collection of texture files. I worked extra on glass to make it look more like an actual glass facade rather than just a blue colored shiny wall.
After that, I moved on to windows. I added procedural windows that are generated based on the building itself, so I don’t have to manually model them or something. I also added different window styles for different types of buildings, so residential buildings can look different from offices and industrial buildings. There were a few problems with the windows. For example, windows were being generated on surfaces where they shouldn’t be, including horizontal faces and things like roof structures or antennas. I added logic to make sure windows are only placed on vertical surfaces and improved the checks used to determine the parts that should receive windows. I also tuned the settings for quite a while till I was satisfied.
Once the windows were looking better, I started focusing more on performance. The procedural textures were lagging stuff, so I made some changes to improve performance. I also added chunks to the building batching system. This will make it simple to add tiling later since the performance right now is not really the best and treating the whole map as one big area is the cause of it I think.
Next I want to continue adding architectural details, starting with enterances and then balconies. After that I’ll move on to things like roofs, roads, and terrain, before eventually getting into environmental details like trees and the actual disaster simulations.