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[florian]

Short question aside: How do you do erosion?

[Alexhans]

Would you be upset if I didn't know what LCS was?

I will.

Liberal Crime Squad, Man!!! the reason I came here in the first place!

Someday, you'll have to try it.  Both of you. 

[Outcast Orange]

Sorry, but saves aren't going to be in yet.

 I am getting very close to that though,
 and currently it saves the first universe you start,
 which will always come up unless you delete the file.

-------------------------------------

Short question aside: How do you do erosion?

There are a ton of rules for erosion, and here are all the ones I care to list/remember:

First off, water is obviously the most crucial role in erosion.
Any tile with direct contact with water will be run through the erosion tests.
For the test to succeed, there has to be a good enough ratio of water/air.
Land isn't considered since that would tip the scales,
 and a lot of exposed tiles would never get a chance at erosion.

Once a tile has passed the erosion test,
 it has a percent chance of other things happening to it,
 based on what it is made up of.

The big split is between stuck/unstuck tiles,
since tiles that are unstuck are easily moved around by water.

Besides being stuck, the tiles may follow the material tree like this:
Grass > Soil > Mud > Sand >< Mud
With the occasional chance of drying mud turning back into soil,
 which sticks the tiles again.

Rock doesn't erode right now, but I'll get around to that at some point.
Grass regrows over exposed soil, and can turn adjacent sand back into loose soil.
Trees now have some terraforming abilities,
 and can slowly convert any sort of land around them back into stuck soil.

There are also non-water causes of erosion.
Unstable features can crumble and fall apart,
 and features on the razor edge of stable will still break down if given enough time.

I have one more rule to add,
 which will limit the vertical stability of 1x1 soil/trunk towers.

If I'm forgetting anything or there is anything more specific you'd like to know, just ask.
I love explaining the technical side of my game, so don't hesitate.
Give me an excuse to ramble about this stuff, please.

-------------------------------------

I should have this done by Wednesday at the latest.

[Siquo]

Technical questions, since you seem to like them  :

Which libraries do you use?
Which rendering technique do you use (VBO (static/dynamic/streaming), Vertex arrays, direct draw)?
Is the player at (0,0,0) and does the world move, or do you move the player and keep the world static?
How do you cull on non-visible terrain, such as tiles that are deep inside a mountain?

[Outcast Orange]

And here's where we learn just how little I know about openGL.

First question... no idea.

Code: [Select]

glutSwapBuffers();

Does that snip answer the question?

-----------------

Here are the libraries:

Code: [Select]

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <sstream>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <bitset>
#include <string>
#include <ctime>
#include <math.h>
#include <vector>
#include <windows.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <stdarg.h>
#include <gl/gl.h>
#include <gl/glu.h>
#include <gl/glut.h>
#include "corona.h"
#include <AL/al.h>
#include <AL/alc.h>
#include <AL/alut.h>

I'm assuming that at least 3 of these aren't necessary.

-----------------

The world is static, and the player/camera are moved accordingly.
When the maps are reset, the player is teleported to the opposite side.

-----------------

I don't know what "cull" means.
I actually have each cube do 6 tests, one for each surrounding neighbor.
If the neighbor doesn't "block", then it draws that side.


I hope that these are decent answers,
 and that you haven't lost any major respect for me.

Bring on the questions.

[Siquo]

Nah, I was just wondering Although I did have higher expectations

Thanks though.

I did exactly the same as you, but just moved on from glut to SDL, which works great, and from immediate drawing to VBOs, and can't get that to work yet.

With culling I mean that if you've got a mountain, checking each and every block deep inside the mountain 6 times for every single frame is a lot of checking...

[Alexhans]

A good way to see if a library is not needed is just to comment the include and look at the errors.

Another good idea is to comment (beside the include statement) the purpose of the inclusion.
e.g.  you add ctime to use the time func for the random seed.  not for anythign else because you're using the glutupdate function.

use cmath instead of math.h

You don't need those
#include <gl/gl.h>
#include <gl/glu.h>
#include <AL/al.h>
#include <AL/alc.h>
They're all included by the glut and alut
what do you need windows.h for?

culling involves not drawing what you wouldn't see anyway.  You'll commonly hear the term, backface culling.

I hope that these are decent answers,
 and that you haven't lost any major respect for me.

As I keep saying.  Your game speaks for itself, stop worrying.  You have a very cool project going on and you are consistent with it.  Not many people can say that.

btw, I've tested a little openal application that runs a chorus of cats and other sounds and didn't have problems with the amount of sounds playing at the same time.  Or it doesn't look like I did (I need to make sure).  I'll still check out the whole devmaster tutorial whenever I get the chance.

[Outcast Orange]

Okay, so the game was perfectly ready for release.
Suddenly out of nowhere,
 I realized it was over 100MB...

So now I need to add support for ogg.
Besides that, the current release is complete.

Alexhans told me to release anyways,
so for those of you brave enough to handle a long download,
 here is the link:

Cloud Scream 0.50 (Sound, Text, and More)

Dwarven Smokeologist's song is a bit too quiet/buggy,
 so I added it to the title screen which I think does it justice.

Press the 'i' key for information.
Press SHIFT+P for auto rotating camera.

I added a ton of sound effects,
 but there are still some needed.
If you want to contribute any, just leave a message.

Trees fight erosion now,
 slowly attempting to convert ground back to hard soil.

I'm sure there are other changes,
 I just can't remember all of them.

Enjoy!

if it is too big for you to comfortably download,
 I should have a smaller version out Friday.

[A Dwarven Smokeologist]

Having trouble running it on Vista

Specs if its important:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Vista SP1
Geforce 9800GT   (screen running at 1440x900)
Audigy SE Soundcard

All up to date drivers

If I attempt to launch the game it tries to load for a minute (console window pops up) then stalls and exits out quietly.

However if I try to launch it with the properties boxed checked "Run in 640x480 screen resolution" it will load up into the game and I can move around for a bit, sound works I'm pretty sure, but after about a minute it will crash out. No error messages.

Cheers though this keeps getting more awesome every time

[Outcast Orange]

That's no fun...
I can see a couple of potential causes though.
I'll see what I can do about it before the Friday release.

I'll have to take out the rain sound effect,
 as it is currently broken/unnecessary.

EDIT:

Out of curiosity,
 you should try removing the sounds out of the folders,
 then see what happens.
Specifically, try removing the rain sound effect.

[A Dwarven Smokeologist]

Yep that worked, good to go

This is a real treat now. You don't have any idea for a autonomous screen saver type mode do you?

[Outcast Orange]

Hmm... if you'd just like to let it run and watch,
 press this sequence:
Shift + Z
Shift + D
Shift + P

That should keep the character safe,
 and the camera rotates for cool points.

[Outcast Orange]

With culling I mean that if you've got a mountain, checking each and every block deep inside the mountain 6 times for every single frame is a lot of checking...

Umm... I thought that the case was different too,
 but after a bit of searching, I can't find any evidence to the contrary.
That's why even after being "super-optimized"
 it was only slightly faster after that one release.

If you can think of a better method,
 then that would be cool.

[qwertyuiopas]

How does it store connections?

If it can put them into the bits of a byte, you can start with a single if() to check if any sides at all should be drawn. It means having to update all neighbor blocks when one changes, but it might be faster to draw. It might be better for processor caching as well, as then you wouldn't need to check other blocks at all, during the draw loop.

[Siquo]

Well, I'm trying to group blocks together into "superblocks", then group those into "super-superblocks" etc, and if one of those superblocks already has all 6 neighbours, or if it's completely filled with "dirt", then I won't have to check all the tiny blocks inside that superblock. However, when I went "inside" one of your mountains, the inside was hollow. Does that mean that there's really nothing there, or that its filled with blocks that just aren't rendered?

I really liked your terraingeneration though, the terrain-flow looked very nice.