I feel like a rockstar! After 2.5 days of programming, I’ve finished rewriting the procedural generation code so that the seams between the chunks all but disappear! Before
, chunks were perfect squares of 64×64 brick spaces. Technically they still are, but I’ve changed it so that the bricks on the top and right-hand side of the chunk can now extend beyond the edges. The left and bottom sides calculate this same overflow of bricks, but uses it to cut away at the existing brick spaces to make room for the bricks in the chunks that exist to that side. It’s kind of hard to explain, but now the entire world is essentially a giant jigsaw puzzle.
Visible seams would reduce immersion since you could clearly see where one chunk ended and another began. Also, by extending the bricks along the seam at the top of the chunks, the player could create a completely flat path that could stretch infinitely, breaking the challenge of horizontal movement.
The hardest part of this was getting the overlapping chunks to communicate to each other to decide which chunk a brick will extend from. Coding this was so incredibly frustrating, but this feeling of accomplishment was well worth it.
Also added:
- Brick-freezing: the ability to mark a brick so that it cannot move any longer. Useful for constructing houses.
- XBox 360 controller support.
- New custom shaders that use detail maps and vertex colors.
