Do you dais?

New textures, and removed much of the complexity from the walls and floor. Added some cheese to handle raised areas - with some ramps and fiddling, I want ziggurats! Beginning to like the result anyway, at least as a framework for more interesting stuff. Coarse wall features can be added fairly easily later, and it's definitely a good contrast to the natural rock.


Note the very annoying black bow-tie in the lower right. That's an edge vertex with broken normals. Wonderful, innit? There are a few places the edges of chunks are highly visible now, this being just one of 'em. Still, it's an improvement I guess.

The next step? Hmm. I think a better abstraction is needed for interesting features in the density function. I'd like to add things like ramps, wells, arches and pillars to the built areas, and rubble, potholes and the like to the natural bits, but without excessively complicating the basic generator. I think a more efficient method of obtaining data from the map would also be good, as it's used many, many times during density evaluation. There are also some weird problems with the natural parts, with walls developing holes and being rather bland. This needs to be fixed as much as possible.

Optimisation is going to be important. It takes far too long to generate a mesh chunk currently, on the order of ~10 seconds per 5x5 tile chunk. This isn't acceptable for a small, confined level, let alone large streaming areas. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of low-hanging fruit here though, and I'm not too worried.

Once the dungeon's looking acceptable and being generated in a sane timeframe, I think I'll concentrate on getting some placeholder meshes in for the player and monsters. The spheres really detract from my sense of satisfaction, far more so than the lack of 'furniture'. Once that's done, maybe it'll be time to start implementing game mechanics again!