High Resolution Terrain - Sapiens Devlog 53

[@peshkybee7721]

Anyone else seriously looking forward to the first time they hop into this after following from the beginning?

[@ChavvyChannel]

yeah totally - if you want to become a playtester i suggest you become active on the discord

[@GhostedGamer]

yes i'm def buying this ever since I seen the trailer he made I knew I just had to get this game

[@iCore7Gaming]

@@ChavvyChannel but that means socializing

[@eagle2735]

Hey do you guys know how much it will cost

[@FlowPoly]

Yeah, it’s pretty cool to see from where this all started from

[@miniminers7487]

This game is just gonna be so cool.

[@nitrogenfume9762]

I don't know why I don't watch all of your videos. Every time I do watch one, it's a lovely experience. 10/10 wholesome content my guy

[@majicDave]

That put a smile on my face, thanks :)

[@Goodgis]

I really love the Sapiens logo. I'm actually a professional Graphic Designer by trade and that gets a A+ in my book.

[@Westfalon]

jeez, I haven't seen an update in a while and I forgot how stunning the atmosphere is. It looks so crisp to breathe, like a tangible coolness. I love it!

[@Jova]

As a programmer myself, I appreciate ALL of these little optimizations and things that you've done for this game. What you've created is stunning.

[@FlowPoly]

Yes Dave. I’m always waiting for another video. Hope you’re doing well. Can’t wait to play this man

[@bolicob]

That skyline at the end looked leagues better than the previous ones. Great Job

[@Hellgath101]

to note about the even higher detail part, coming from playing a lot of minecraft, the first times I might not bother to wait around for an even higher detailed version of pre-gen, but as i get more experienced, the higher the detail in generation can really add to the feeling of finding a really great place to start my base, depending on what exactly im looking for. But having not played it i cant quite say it matters with the amount of generation in each world, seems like i could sit forever on one planet just looking around. Looking great regardless :)

[@mnattew]

I absolutely love how much care you put into every tiny piece of the game. Almost every game doesn’t fix these things at all and it makes their games SUPER choppy. I’m so glad your doing this I don’t care how long I have to wait for the game, just get it done right when you finish it.

[@tithonusandfriends8519]

Maybe have it more like a cinematic experience (changeable in the options menu) where it is like a space odyssey or all those other planet reveals, to make *your* planet feel more unique. A long zoom in on this little light until you are in awe at the scale.

[@Ziflinz]

Dave, You might check out the Ghost Recon and Far Cry 5 GDC Vault videos they did in 2017/18 if you haven't seen them. They sample their material-id map 4 times (2x2) to bilinear/box filter the sampled textures they reference. They also blend to a lower-resolution dynamically generated texture in the distance. I know you've got the hexagon thing going, but it might give you a couple of ideas.

[@FuriousTedyBear]

I really like how you don't sensationalize your devlogs. Your style is realistic which I find a lot more interesting and inspiring. Nice job.

[@matheus-kirchesch]

maybe billboards would help with the long distance render?

[@luttinbuck413]

Seeing this and knowing you made it from scratch must feel awesome.

[@Jabrils]

Is the tree placement seeded? What happens in the usecase of Bob Ross chops down a tree, I zoom to outter space, or visit another village & comeback, does it re-spawn? Will is unspawn? I am very curious to know! :D

[@majicDave]

OK, I’ll explain that a bit more in the next video or two. But It won’t spawn back, all changes are saved. Multiplayer made it tricky but I have a pretty good system for all of this that keeps world saves and network traffic load small.

[@DesertCookie]

I'm stoked for multiplayer. A game like this in multiplayer has been a dream of mine for years now. I'm just not proficient enough with OGL or even Vulkan, and don't have the time and dedication you do.

[@Obiwahn89]

I discovered your channel recently and just finished watching all of your devlogs. Super entertaining and inspiring, especially given the fact that you are a solo dev. Also the quality of your devlogs improved a lot throughout the (almost) six years; the current style is perfect. Excited to watch the next devlog.

[@rainey06au]

Still absolutely stunning. 4 days I've been binge watching your whole series from World Project #1 lol

[@harshivpatel6238]

The world is going to be very important factor in this game, so you constantly making the small/big tweaks to match what your vision is for it, is really important, Content, you can add manually to a point,( but it certainly takes a lot of effort to make the small things work just right) or make a system of abstract types of objects/behaviours instead, that modders could replace/alter for different types of objects, also change the behavior with mods. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is too much type of content that could potentially fit in the game So it could be better to first build a content management system that covers all aspects of the content, from appearance data, where it should be located in world, types of optional animations it could have, all of it's in-game properties, and behaviors if any etc. Standard abstractions for trees+ fruits, for vegetations, for animals, for build-able and craftable objects, and so on... that you could later (re)use to feed in values to either manually add in individual details or to potentially do parts of it proceduraly.

[@peterlewis2178]

Looking awesome! The only thing I really want to see now is large dense forests, and somehow rendering that in the distance, too. Before humans, a lot of the planet was covered in massive forests, and the small and super sparse trees in the game right now really breaks the immersion for me, since it's supposed to be a prehistoric start. And trees would ideally be much taller and larger than we're used to. The reason that most trees we see in the world today aren't very large is because we have deforested a ton of the old growth forests. But without deforesting, there would be a lot more really ancient trees, hundreds if not thousands of years old.

[@Skeffles]

Another great update. I like how you can zoom out and see the overworld. Kind of reminds me of Populous: The Beginning.

[@MATTERSGAMES]

I love coming back every few months and seeing what’s changed! Glad to see you’re still working on this ✌️

[@davidjoffe-hunter7016]

That river valley at the end was stunning! The work looks well worth it

[@yannzul]

About the Create World menu, you could create a new world in the background when your game just finished launching, then use this one when you click on new game. And do the same when you need a new random seed. So essentially when you use one, you create another one in the background. Good content as always :)

[@lumek4513]

The technical details are very interesting! I'm glad you go into them every now and then :)

[@xarunoba3894]

I love how this keeps on getting fleshed out more and more. Great job!

[@Obsiduction]

Can't wait to play it. It look so cool and perfect, and you manage to still improve the game at each devlog

[@4rs0nn]

This is such an awesome change! Love it.

[@magoochito]

I've been following the devlogs for a while now, looking real good!

[@colorandcontrast]

Can't say I totally understood your texturing explanation but as a baby dev I reeeeally appreciated it. Would watch a channel of just that stuff if you think it doesn't fit here.

[@ashtonh991]

It's incredible watching you work on this game and slowly but surely improve it over time. Really crazy. Great work, I know it'll be one of the most quality games to come out for quite a long time.

[@Forcemaster2000]

That view of the valley at the end of the video was amazing looking!

[@emilsitell5484]

Love to see some of the technical details. Would love to see some more of that!

[@downbeatinteractive6236]

Loved your explanation of the texture mapping!

[@gattie12ben]

Every build log is getting more exciting!

[@Hemrahban]

amazing to see all the progress, keep up the great work! kudos to you for doing this all by yourself and getting THESE results. really looking forward to this :)

[@samuelgrahame3617]

Looks awesome man. Love the resolution increase for the map/globe

[@OnceSecond]

Really cool content ! I was actually rewatching your dev logs from the beginning so new videos are great haha. If I may, the transition at the beginning, I know it makes things smoother but it also "hide" the effect of your parameters I would say and I find easier for the eye/brain to understand what happens when you see it switch directly on top of each other. Otherwise it's really cool !

[@rwwkv6]

Every new devlog is better than actual christmas :D

[@kman8186]

keep up the awesome work my dude

[@szeartur4813]

I always love the graphics improvement episodes

[@Siminfrance]

Really looks great, I love how we can see the progress of the game from what it was to what it is now. Make me exited at to what it will be when done!

[@TimmyBlumberg]

I love how casually you talk about these really gnarly programming problems. I’m a programmer and they blow me away.

[@mslindqu]

Closing visual is awesome.

[@Void-rd1nh]

Cant wait :) and this is a suggestion when the game is done vr would fit really good in this game

[@Sanspepins]

Adding the ability to select which monitor the game displays on in settings would be great. I find a lot of people don't know about shift + windows. And even then doesn't always work with some games/apps depending on the settings they're on.

[@agrogers1]

I watch your videos for the same reasons I watch Wintergarten - not because I want to play what you are making (sorry) but because I love watching smart people make cool stuff. Thanks for the videos and I hope you sell heaps when it is released.

[@iangarth6174]

Your 'constant battle' is really paying off mate!

[@brettgoldsmith8584]

A few passing observations: The world rendering: 👏👏👏 The worlds look very realistic now. I particularly enjoy the day night cycle while the world loads in. That was very clever. The Mountains: A+ work. They look non-offensive now from a distance. The trees: ...should probably flicker in and out a bit less when you are zooming around. I hear you about wanting to get to the content. I often feel that way about my projects. In my humble opinion, unless there is anything MAJOR you want to add with the engine or rendering, I would start working on game mechanics and content at this point. As you do, you can note down all the little graphical things you want to improve. Over a few weeks working on content you should be in a place to better prioritize what things actually need to be added to improve gameplay, and what things only matter at the Realistic Planet Generator Awards Ceremony. Here's the thing though: I have already spent over 50 hours in the new Microsoft flight simulator. That game has very little "content", but is still a blast. So perhaps a pretty world *is* all you need. What do I know?

[@PWDMaximum]

The game I've been looking for. Definitely getting a purchase from me when it releases. 👍

[@j.mihalik5840]

This looks absolutely amazing.

[@AjAce19]

For the distance trees, if you properly Utilize LODs you could have lots of trees in the distance that have such little polys or even just a single square billboarded so that it takes up way less of a performance hit.

[@viper_exe_]

I think entering the world could be a whole lot smoother. Having the ui move away and the camera zoom into the planet from the planet creation screen would be a lot more user friendly and given the game some more "flow" all things considered, I'm loving the new changes!

[@mitchclarke19]

It's looking amazing so far! You're really doing an awesome job! Is there any chance it will be available for MacOS?

[@harshivpatel6238]

Suggestion : 5:00 , the zooming in on the planet is too fast, tune it to be a little bit slower, or moving with a lot of inertia, At the end the stop transition should end slowly rather than abruptly, gives it a nice polished feel... Another point is that there is too much land area on generated world, for earth we have like what 1/4 th of the planet's surface area as land mass, you could limit the land mass to like 30% of total surface area, rest being oceans. Makes it less odd I guess? Sorry If I seem to be nit-picking bur around 7:20, that's where you can also stretch the zooming in transition to allow the loading levels to be less abrupt one after another, adding in the feeling of being gigantic thing. Lastly, at the end of the video the descending valley like terrain with the river at bottom looks simply amazing!!! I feel like terrain modifications are hard at this stage; --- but as rivers will likely be primary source of constant drinking water in beginning, they will be very important, I have to ask this : 1. could you make it so that, If a river is larger than a certain size, it should be at much lower than the terrain surrounding it, (as large rivers tend to be) due to erosion ....? 2. Could you make it so that the land closest to big rivers (IDK a proper word for it, the belts surrounding river on both sides) should have decent amount of big + medium sized and small stones, a source for all sorts of stones basically. This add up to the game mechanics that players have to adhere as well as gives the appearance of the world more detail, more "filled in" I guess? Also the those "river belts" should vary in width, so you could have tribes that are built on "shores" of rivers I guess? And their livelihood to be revolving a lot around rivers ?

[@christianmuriel8918]

I would love to know more about how did you organize your Engine, programming paradigms, architecture, how do you handle entities, what libraries are you using (for audio, input, windows, networking....) Learning all of that from an experienced programmer like you would be a very interesting resource to learn C++ in 2020.

[@Rhedox1]

You should try and render some tree billboards further into the distance.

[@canidaeSynapse]

I'd love to crank up that render distance, but the performance hit is indeed real. Think there'd be a way to cheaply represent trees in the distance? I personally think it would add a huge amount to the look of the game, really give that sense of scale! Otherwise, great work! Looking forward to your next log!

[@GhostedGamer]

This game just looks too good to be true can't wait till I get my hands on a copy 😁

[@richardbajuzik2445]

For tree at very background you can also use simple sprites which looks like a 3d tree - 2d textures always facing to the camera

[@HoboInASuit4Tune]

It's amazing what you do on (bar a few contractors here 'n there?) your own, Dave. Just imagine what other talented devs with a passion for the game can add once it's out with modding. Sapien Fortress in no time! :)

[@holthuizenoemoet591]

I love it, it would be so cool if you could license your game world generation as its own engine/framework. Because it can be used for so many games.

[@davidfails2866]

9:14 it would look better if you had larger tree variances later on...

[@sremret]

This is like blockheads 2!! I love this game so much

[@davidfails2866]

1:42 maybe add a sample blur effect pic to screen for load time issues if needed... so a false world blur of variance to each before it actually loads in...

[@davidfails2866]

or start with larger valle chunks of world and have vary detail of sides of bugger ones added later instead of what you have where the whole thing kinda goes in at once and color of ground is charged after a few seconds of that chunk of world loaded in.. or all together only toss in half the world and add the rest as time progresses.

[@ViliamVadocz]

I would like if bodies of water didn't look separated from a far. That mountain view onto the river near the end of the video looks great, but I would like if the river was continuous.

[@davidfails2866]

6:30 game looks cool. any chances on adding random ships flying by planets before launch to give your tribes bonus abilities? or the planet bonus knowledge on first start of world... like hidden stuff... idk maybe make that an easy mode would be a cool way of looking at it.

[@THEchiQ]

Blimey. You’ve done a LOT!

[@SanctumCreative]

Nice one Dave!

[@madao7865]

Just an idea but maybe you could add an overlay on the ground that adjusts the color where trees are supposed to be but are too far to render. This could make hills in the distance look like they're partially covered in forest, without having to render individual trees.

[@davidfails2866]

15:16 so this is the layer s of the map fro lowest detail to highest to form the triangle hex squares we see right? and buffer is the first till it calc the last if scale is maxed and not capped to low quality and in that is CPU calculations... less or more on hardware...

[@FFehse-dk9is]

Seeing even with higher detail still fractured rivers, I think you should introduce some "detail-density" map and sample your terrain according to that density, meaning rivers, coastlines, mountain-ridges get higher importance while flat planes get lower importance. You should be able to show the horizon mountain line and the rivers more defined and detailed. Just a thought. Great progress! I'm jealous, your terrain generation is what I'd love to use in my game idea, but it's way above my skills. I'll have to go for 2d map 😅

[@kaiserschmarrn260]

Is fighting a thing for example fighting between tribes and raids and small battles that might be fun

[@MrHeliMan]

Well, nice to see the distant terrain getting upgraded! Now bunch of things I'd like to ask and stuff... One thing is, that the Wishlist steam link doesn't work for me xD. Another then, I was gonna say, that I feel like the map is way too flat. That it doesn't have many huge hills and such, well at 15:19 I kinda changed my opinion, but not completely. I still think it would be nice to see large mountains, rocky ones with snow at the top, but ones that kinda come out of the ground in a massive contrast. Kinda like when you type "Alps" into google images... It would be nice to have more impassable or hardly passable terrain around which you'd have to play. Be it huge mountains, swamps, canyons... I imagine it would make the game much more fun and interesting, if there was more ways die sorta. I don't know what your plan for Sapiens is for the future and how close you wanna keep to reality, but I could imagine say Tall dangerous mountains being the only / best source of some kind of metal, but to get it you'd have to make a risky decision. Maybe you couldn't find food up there, so you'd have to pack a lot of it with you. Send a group of people to do the work so it doesn't take so long. Give them some special clothing so they don't freeze up there. Same for swamps or something like that. Different risk / reward trade offs. That I think would make the game very interesting even for masses. Another thing I was just thinking about. One thing (likely impossible) that I'd love to see in Sapiens would be realistic weather system and on top of that, volumetric clouds. Obviously not the MS flight simulator 2020 level, but something similar. Volumetric clouds look beautiful and would make the game amazing to look at. Last thing is an idea I got from and older game. I believe it might have been Seed of Andromeda? Well basically, the super distant trees were replaced with just like 2D low detail texture thing that was always facing you. I don't know the correct terminology for it, but what I know is, that the world looked really alive as you could see huge forests all the way up to the horizon. And this was like some 5 - 10 years ago so I am pretty sure you could do something similar today. The game ran perfectly well even with this and it really looked amazing. I think that's it for now. Keep up the great work! xD

[@lumek4513]

One optimization you could make is to move some of the terrain generation to the gpu, all the perlin noise lookups can be parallelized!

[@Jay-pj4sq]

I'm not an expert but maybe you should look into tessellation if you're not doing it already. It could make performance better when rendering distant areas, though there's not much detail in your game so don't know what the performance benefit will be. Also authored LODs for grass and other details could potentially mean faster load times. Also to help with load times, try looking into directstorage. That could drastically change the draw distance and stuff.

[@terraint3697]

Excellent polish!

[@Fence07]

This looks awesome 👀

[@murphystearns8009]

if you ever need a playtester, ask graystillplays.

[@daniel4647]

He's just going to break everything. He makes funny videos, or at least he used to, but I'm not sure how good advertisement he is. Should get someone that'll try to play the game more seriously.

[@murphystearns8009]

@@daniel4647 the point is to break it is what I was getting at to see what can improve but I agree

[@tithonusandfriends8519]

or asianhalfsquat, with his new graphics bling.

[@FlowPoly]

SpiffingBrit?

[@fennecky3764]

Keep it up my dude

[@desertdweller9003]

As far as rendering large amounts of trees, what if you assign a random value, (say 1-5) to each tree entity (maybe based off of the algorithm used to determine the tree locations to save on memory), and the higher the value, the further away from the camera it has to be before not being rendered, this way the amount of trees away from the camera slowly decreases, saving on performance, and allowing for a larger render range? Don't know if this would work with your implementation, but just an idea. Loving the series btw, it's always a big inspiration for my projects!

[@UncleGus007]

15:30 man, that looks so pretty

[@greenie7872]

I kinda wish there was less land bridges. But this game looks spectacular

[@jollyjadentnt7963]

i like this, it looks interesting. i have got a question tho... what happened to 'The Blockheads'? why'd you discontinue and stopped updating it?

[@majicDave]

The Blockheads had a good run there for a number of years, but I had taken it as far as I wanted to, and most of the player base had started to move on. It was time to move on to a new bigger challenge.

[@HelamanGile]

Awesome

[@MrMaltavius]

You should do with the trees what you did with the grass, for trees smaller than 64 pixels or something just use a texture plane

[@DreapsterAtRoblox]

I’ve always been here since the beginning I wonder if this type of tech will be used in games like rimworld or thrive in future iterations of games like it as well.

[@Torsken1982]

You could make the trees be generated as a texture when they are really farr away

[@TobbyTukaywan]

Would it be possible to represent trees in the distance as 2d sprites or even dots in order to increase the maximum render distance?

[@cosmicfish4650]

The planet gives me Rimworld vibes

[@TheJishanator]

Yessss

[@BariumBlue]

The usual solution to rendering far away trees is to use billboard sprites, is that something that you think would work here? Also, man, could not quite follow 100%. I think It's cool that you could merge some hexagons in the map level into less individual triangles, and I think I understood that the colors for the hexagons aren't continuous to prevent hard color boundaries. The part about using RGB values in one texture to map to a different texture (3 levels of them?) did lose me though. It does sound like it was hard to conceive and implement though

[@JayMarBu]

Looking great as always, though I do have one question for you. When you were demonstrating the render distance stuff I noticed that you don’t change the tree geometry based on distance for example bill boarding trees that are very far away. Is there any particular reason for that, or is it just something you haven’t got to yet?

[@z-beeblebrox]

This is looking really awesome. But I'm curious, with all this world generation detail, is there a long-term goal for the game to exploit these gigantic maps in some way? Or is it just purely for the fun of generating a whole world for our primitive tribes to live in?

[@thehambone1454]

I remember awhile back you made a video and you talked about your screen settings (colors) were not configured correctly, mind sharing what you did to ensure it was configured correctly? I think my settings are off which might not be so good when developing a custom engine XD.

[@janikcodes]

Whaaat a new devlog so early!!??

[@knowledgedh7700]

can you make tree's in the distance a quad with a tree texture if its far out enough?

[@ferenccseh4037]

You'll have to make a new intro with the new textures, grass and stuff.

[@Jova]

Can you add a slider for rotation speed so you can make it stop rotating while you're in space looking at it

[@AntonioNoack]

Would it be possible for you to load the trees and terrain in section by section, so it isn't abrupt, but relatively continuous (like chunks in Minecraft, generated one by one)?