Before working on another big task, I chose to spend a couple of days making small changes and also spent that time getting people within my course to test out my project and give feedback on what they liked and disliked.
The feedback was to allow me to make a note of what could make it better and elements a majority of people feel need improving or adding to be made a higher priority.
The most common comment was that the terrain looked too smooth, this was a task that I had already noted down as important and the feedback from peers helped confirm the importance of this. I have already started looking into this briefly and understand that this requires running through the noise generation a few times with different frequencies to create minor noise offsets.
The second comment was referring to object spawning and creating a variety of objects that can spawn. Suggested ideas were to create more prefabs that can be generated, with some being objective based (such as pickups) to gamify the assignment. Another suggestion was to get the rocks and trees themselves to procedurally generate to manipulate the mesh, with the marching cube algorithm being mentioned. The addition of more prefabs would be very easy to implement and will be added later in the project as finishing touches. The algorithm on the over hand will be noted as a potential task that I could add if I have enough time before the submission date, however, about tree generation I plan to look into using Poisson disc sampling to generate potential spawn positions for trees as this would prevent trees spawn inside each other which currently happens with the random placement.
All other comments regarding my work were either small tasks that I was able to work on this week or ways to make the project more visually pleasing. I have made a note of these however these are not a high priority for me as I want to focus mainly on getting my project working.
Minor tweaks
One of the things that were brought to my attention was to make changes to the main menu screen and create a reason for the two separate panels, in response I renamed the play button to "Customise Level" and created a new play button that when clicked with automatically load the player into a new scene with a random seed and the default colours.
Alongside the new menu changes, I added an option to return to the main menu screen that would prevent the need to close and reopen the game every time. This created a bug where the DDOL (Don't Destroy On Load) wouldn't reset and caused colours to only use the default ones (even if you chose to randomise), I realised that after the scene is generated the DDOL is no longer required and is just using up memory so I set it up to destroy after the generation has finished. Without the DDOL, when we entered the main menu scene a new instance was created with prevented any errors from arising.
To pause the game, the player presses P and can press it again to resume.
I altered some values within the mesh generator, decreasing the Perlin noise scale and increasing the height to times the y-axis and that allowed more realistic hills and created valleys which greatly improved the look of my project in my opinion.
Along with this change, I implemented colour offsets allowing the different layers of the terrain to have different shades that added minor detail.
The final change I made was to add a jump to the character controller which everyone requested, I also included running which only applies if the player is on the ground.
This week was mainly focusing on getting lots of small tasks done to help improve the project with my next task being to implement Poisson disc sampling to determine spawn points of trees within the scene.
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