Close up.

Also, I think I have a good idea for the map art direction. I will try to implement that next.

Thanks for posting it. It was a really interesting read. I was hoping you got your credit back ☹️

If you want to ready the old story, is here. Great read, really cool how the guys doing the decompilation would get excited when they could recognize a function, like the one that spawns rupees out of cut grass.
arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/...

I do like the flexibility it offers. Like below, where I can group regions and create an "enemy mask" and color grey the captured territory. Or create a "frontline mask", and highlight the region where enemy/player collide. I might not need to discard it after all. 8/8

There are issues to work out, like two sites highlight at the same time. This is a color I need to remove from the curated list. It sometimes creates artifacts where a border from another site highlights. Just thinking about implementing another system is annoying. 7/8

Out of everything so far in the game, this is the one implementation that took the most to do, and I wasn't even sure it was going to work. I was just to stubborn to give up. I bet there are better, easier ways of doing this. But I do like how computationally cheap it is. 6/8

After reviewing and testing around 1000 colors (picked with an algorithm) I was able to curate a list of ~700 colors that the shader is able to differentiate. With this, I can create a site mask and use it as a mask texture in the world map shader 5/8

I liked the texture approach because it felt clean, it also avoided creating many objects to track the regions, like additional polygons that now needed to hug the 3D terrain. But turns out that picking MANY colors that could discriminate well with each other was an ordeal. 4/8

There are many approaches to this I guess. I chose to create a texture from the Voronoi regions and color code each region. That way we could just pass a color to a custom shader using the texture as a mask and highlight the selected region. Simple right? Well.... 3/8

By using basic parameters like distance separation between vertices, I can create low density or high density points in the map, thus creating few or many regions. The question is how to use the 2D regions, in the 3D map? 2/8

Thanks!

Looking forward!

Lessons learnt would be very helpful. Maybe you can get some good feedback as well.

My next focus is complete the UI elements to have the basic pieces for the game loop. I also recognize I need to pick and implement the art direction, for enhancing and aligning the game visuals. That will take me a while, so we will talk about Voronoi next. 3/3

Here is the actual result screen from the battle video. The screen might not look like much, but having the data tracking allows me to make the stats visible throughout the campaign. And I do want to make them prominent. 2/3

So, the question becomes, if the terrain is procedural how do we place nodes, and how do we highlight sites and create a dynamic frontline? For this project, we will need to talk about Voronoi 😮. 4/4