After the big continent update I finally sat down and just played for a while. Walking around instead of flying a debug camera is humbling. Three things stood out right away, so this week started with fixing exactly those.
Water That Ends Where the Shore Begins#
Lakes had strange floating edges. The water surface was cut off along the coarse grid of the world map, while the real ground below was still a metre or two lower. From the side you could see a thin sheet of water hanging in the air over the shallows.
Now the lake surface follows the actual ground: it reaches out until the terrain rises above the water, and the land in a band around each lake is kept above the lake level, so the water always meets a real shoreline. I also built a small detector that checks every water edge against the terrain. At the lake next to the old spawn it found more than 600 floating edge points before the fix. Now it finds none.
A Start Worth Remembering#
The second problem: the world felt like a steppe and stones were hard to find. Two reasons. Loose stones only grew on bare rock, so on heath and meadows there were almost none. And the player always started at the centre of the map, which with the new continents is a high, windswept plateau above the tree line.
Stones, branches, driftwood and boulders now lie where you would expect them: on heath and meadows, along river banks and beaches, under the trees. On the plateau there are now more than twenty times as many loose stones as before, and the nearest one is usually a few steps away.
The start itself is now chosen on purpose. The game looks for a gentle spot at a forest edge, close to fresh water, below the tree line. For the current world that is a quiet lake in a valley, framed by spruce and birch, with gravel on the shore and everything you need for the first tools within reach.
The Sound of the North#
The ambience sounded like a rainforest: birdsong everywhere, all the time. Scandinavia sounds different. Mostly wind, water and a lot of space, with a raven somewhere in the distance.
The old bird loops are gone. The background is now wind in the conifers, wind over the open heath, water lapping at the lake shore, and in winter a muffled cold wind or a blizzard. Animals are single calls placed around you in the world, only a few per minute, and they depend on where and when you are: ravens and crows almost anywhere, gulls only at the coast, a lone songbird in the birch woods in early summer, owls at night, ice cracking on frozen lakes in winter. When it rains, the animals go quiet.
What’s Next#
Animations are the next big step, built as code so that people, villagers and animals share one system, followed directly by the first version of combat.