Since my last dev log I’ve been working on terrain. I started with simple noise on a grid so the particles had something cool to fall and interact with rather than a boring flat plane.
Then I had the idea of making the terrain a planet like fluid flowing on it and stuff like that. Actually got it working. It just wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. It made the project overly complex and kind of shift the focus towards the terrain instead of the fluid and made it harder to play with it. And also the fluid would obviously spread around over the planet so you couldn’t even see most of the cool stuff. And I spent a lot of time on that but well I eventually reverted and added a seabed in a box. That made the fluid the focus instead of the scenery and stuff and how it turned out in the end kind of looks dope.
Well with the new terrain I spent time making it look sandy and good. I also switched from rendering some stuff as wireframes to actual meshes Shoudl’ve done this before but back then I guess I got lazy even though most of the stuff for that was already set up
Water is really what’s been improved. Particles were just tiny colored spheres before, which I guess is okay for debugging but doesn’t look like water. I’ve been building something called screen space fluid rendering instead which just renders every particle as a billboard that always looks at/faces the camera and does some other cool stuff behind. Mine works I guess but I still have to improve it a lot. Like I guess the fluid looks more like water but still it looks like a bunch of balls so yeah that’s what I want to focus on next. After that, I’ll add proper collisions between objects, then scene polish, then audio. Audio is something I am excited for!