River Based Terrain Generation - Sapiens Devlog 36

Wishlist now on Steam! Link is below.
Rivers can be a bit of a problem with procedural terrain, so instead of trying to calculate rivers on top of perlin noise based terrain, I've instead started with the rivers and built the terrain up from there. I also have a whole new world creation menu where you can see a preview of the globe, and customize it before you start a game.
In Sapiens, evolve your primitive hunter gatherers through thousands of years of technological advancement. Feed, protect and grow your tribe, build towns and industry, and advance through the ages in this first person civilization building god game for PC. Play with your friends in co-operative or competitive multiplayer, all on a procedurally generated planet larger than Earth.
Wishlist on Steam: store.steampow...
Sapiens website: playsapiens.com
Developer website: majicjungle.com
Follow on twitter: @playsapiens or @majicDave
Sapiens Discord / discord

[@sammcguire8667]

I spent 3 days making a sprite move on screen, almost at your level.

[@benrex7775]

It took me 1 day to remodel a button into a healf-bar in pygame. I'm right there with you.

[@majicDave]

I can remember doing the same, we all have to start somewhere :)

[@miauw8762]

@@majicDave how much experience do you have? And where do you learn this stuff?

[@fawazaljohani8447]

@@miauw8762 I'm pretty sure he has a lot of experience, and he got it from experience, in a few words, get your hands dirty

[@stupidrainbo]

@@fawazaljohani8447 He got his experience from experience!?

[@chaoticdevelopment8542]

The rivers could be super useful for rafts which would give you fast transport in exporting resources and characters just an idea ;p

[@smakkacowtherealone]

so slave ships

[@Zero11s]

earth is flat

[@smakkacowtherealone]

@@Zero11s you elbow faced simpleton

[@smakkacowtherealone]

@@Zero11s listen, I will continue to believe the earth is round. You won't stop me.

[@Zero11s]

@@smakkacowtherealone well we have religious freedom so go as you please

[@Danidev]

Can't wait for release man, and congrats on the baby! That's amazing :)

[@smile_stories7100]

You... I know you

[@mattthebanana]

Hi Dani! How are you doing? I’m a big fan.

[@fawazaljohani8447]

CAN YOU PLEASE CALL BRACKEYS AND TELL HIM ABOUT THIS DUDE, GET HIM IN YOUR CLUB FOR FUCK SAKE HE IS A FUCKING LEGEND, JUST LOOK AT THAT GOD DAMN PLANET ITS HUGE

[@datscrazy4095]

@@fawazaljohani8447 He knows about em trust me... Dani and Jabrills know about him HIGHLY unlikely he isn't known by Brackey's when they all are working on the Game Jam.

[@the_untextured]

h

[@Jabrils]

Putting the product youre working to ship aside, the world youre building is absolutely beautiful. I can't wait to try my hand at building me own engine. So inspiring.

[@vickylance]

Hey, man :D Awesome to find you here. I can't wait to see your video building your own game engine :D

[@z-beeblebrox]

Starting from rivers is brilliant! This is one of the few procedural terrain generators I've seen that generate rivers correctly because of it (well...as close to correct as reasonable!) I notice too, because of the way it uses the rivers to calculate terrain height, that you have lots of areas with very shallow banks (which is uncommon in games but very common irl), and that makes me wonder what it would look like if you added a very slight wave-ish motion to the water's actual height. I think you'd get some really interesting looking marsh-like areas where the banks are especially shallow. Plus, if that works, then you could introduce flooding! :D (or maybe not that sounds kind of brutal if the game can just wash away all your progress)

[@benrex7775]

I love the idea of marshes and waves.

[@surrealsupercell7217]

Natural disasters would actually be kinda cool...

[@spooki-2451]

""wash a-way , wash a-way !""

[@ccstudios2960]

Nice can’t wait for the release! Also you should make some tutorials on how to make a game engine, I think it would be interesting to see how it’s done! Love your work and can’t wait to see how it turns out!

[@_Nerdiful_]

Check out The Cherno's channel. He's been doing a series on writing a game engine from the ground up for months now.

[@ryann7760]

requesting jungle/dense forest. (ancient temples/structures from a lost civilization would be cool aswell) :) loving the updates!

[@sondrehyland3818]

I realy like the idea of building up a civilization, so adding ancient temples would take away from this mindset. However I am also intrigued by your idea. Adding an option for post apocalyptic world, like the surface in "The Time Machine" or that type of scenario, would be quite mysterious and thrilling!

[@ZeroRelevance]

Ryan Neuman You should copy this to the suggestions section in the discord server. He has a higher chance of reading it there than here

[@thomkok12]

Or be able to make structures like that would be awesome too.

[@ajmentel2453]

@@sondrehyland3818 I agree with you, but what is funny is that society as we know it currently doesn't recognize that there have been large societies before us that fell due to environmental changes that sent us back to the Stone Age and that our society is the result of our ancestors picking up the pieces. If you're intrigued, check out Joe Rogan's podcasts with Graham Hancock. I bring this up because I feel as if this game will try to incorporate some hints of mystery and things unexplained into it, like Minecraft or Terraria. But, Sapiens seems more grounded than those two titles, so adding mysterious ruins and ancient decrepit temples is definitely the way to go.

[@rijugas]

@@ajmentel2453That sounds ridiculously stupid...

[@gderu6109]

Congrats about the baby!

[@DeliusVDB]

Can't wait to play this when it's released. It look extremely good.

[@forgilageord]

Thank you, KZbin algorithm, for showing me this amazing looking game. Never heard of this before, but now I'm looking forward to its release!

[@SizzlingSquiggle]

It's so cool to see you working from a distant view of the world... because you forget how small you are in it and how beautiful the world is when you step inside it!

[@houstonhampton2418]

Congratulations on the baby. I don’t have a pc but I’m very interested in this project. Keep up the great work

[@MaxEthoWatch]

I understand that having trees be visible from long distances is a performance issue, but if there were some way to make forested mountain-flanks appear darker green and mottled, that would be awesome; at the moment they look tragically barren. Love the work, been following since Ambience!

[@RialuCaos]

Maybe he could make the level of detail change the 3D trees into 2D billboard sprites with just images of trees at a distance? I'm not sure how it'd look but it might be an improvement from the complete disappearance of trees.

[@kiawildberger]

@@RialuCaos ive seen something like that done somewhere, and it was either bob ross or some rendering engine iirc it looked really good and wasnt bad performance-wise

[@criminallyinsaneskel]

I'm excited to setup a tribe on a river with those stunning views and send a boat down the river or explore that nearby mountain! I can't wait to see what there will be to find! Ancient treasure, other tribes, animals, who knows what else! I am also loving these videos, fascinating technical overview!

[@UnintendedSheep]

That new tab to create a new world is amazing! I cant wait to mess around in this game. It looks like so much fun! Also grats on the baby!

[@The1wsx10]

yeah it looks awesome being super fast like that

[@MrHeliMan]

I love your work. Each update seems to bring great features. The rivers look so realistic from the globe view too. I wish you keep adding features and make the planet more memorable and less flat. More biomes, caves, waterfalls, very steep mountains and such... It could end up looking like the Middle-earth :D

[@jeanjacquesstrydom]

From all the dev log videos I've seen, the world in Sapiens is by far the coolest terrain generation

[@surrealsupercell7217]

The sense of vastness on being a real planet is simply incredible... Especially with the terrain detail and realism.

[@nn6404]

This guy is making something really special. I don't even care when it releases. Just watching this design process unfold is super fascinating. I wish other games like Ancient Cities and Ostriv would do videos like these.

[@maxsmith8196]

This game honestly looks like my dream, I would to have a world generator like that alone. But to actually be able to play in the world is mind blowing to me, the feeling of the game is very important to me, and so far you’ve just nailed it! You take so many things that similar games struggle with, and find a way to solve the problem, instead of just doing some kind of patchwork of easy solutions. Can’t wait to where this goes!

[@matyastomoga9944]

One of my favourite part of Rimworld was that you could travel, if you can make that good in your game, that would make the game a lot better! And you could also make secrets on the map, like obelisks and there could be a mystery to solve like in Surviving Mars. Keep up the good work!

[@spdhome]

Love the procedural generation! It's looking really nice. To add a bit of diversity to the rivers you might consider adding spring locations in certain biomes. A spring could generate pretty much anywhere and create a river or stream that would work it's way down to the lowest point. If it generated at a low point it would create a pond or lake, not sure if that fits in with your waterway system of travel though.

[@DandolfiGames]

Looks great! Gotta love that globe view with the sliders! Amazing work, keep IT up! Looking forward to future updates

[@jesswasher7552]

Congratz on the baby!! And about the game i just want to say its looking great so far, and i really feel like you absolutely nailed the atmosphere with the couple songs you have that play.

[@gblawrence034]

Just recently stumbled across your channel. Started watching your Sapiens devblog series, which is really interesting by the way - I found it fascinating to see the development and creation of an idea and the gameplay steadily progressing. The game looks stunning and I will definitely look at buying it when it releases. Then I looked back at your earliest videos and realised you’re the creator behind some of my favourite mobile games as a kid! I used to play the chopper games for hours on end. Thank you for being here Dave and thank you for logging the journey of your new game. I will be subscribing and following your game from now on. Props to you!!

[@bradyunderwood8171]

Glad you are keeping up on the devlogs! Im getting more and more hyped each week!

[@ncoll36]

This game has such a beautiful aesthetic to it, and enabling biomes again adds so much more to it. I can't wait to see what other sort of content you add to this base engine along the way. I'm glad you brought up about how you plan to start the game and how you'd normally interact with it, because I've always wondered about how you speed around and things popping in and out of render. The way you plan to do it seems pretty solid to me.

[@rogue]

Just discovered this and I LOVE it. Excited to see where you take this!

[@Rossilaz58]

Same! Discovered it a while back and honestly can't wait any longer!

[@Siminfrance]

Congratulation on the addition to your family. Thanks for the update! I am not famillar with LUA express, (or whatever it is called), so I would love to see an update on that :)

[@Gidaio]

LuaJIT is what he mentioned. JIT stands for "Just In Time", and is used to refer to compiling an interpreted language (like Lua) as you use the functions, so next time they're used, they don't have to be reinterpreted.

[@Siminfrance]

@@Gidaio lol, maybe I should have gone back to listen. But still, I am keen to find out more about it.

[@Gidaio]

@@Siminfrance Haha. Most of that wasn't actually in the video. I use a lot of JITs for other languages at work, and have used LuaJIT before. Still, I haven't done much, so I'd love to hear him go into more detail.

[@ecla141]

Another awesome addition to your game. I honestly can’t wait to play this. Keep up the good work!

[@jakejakeo5008]

Looking amazing

[@aedan_s]

This is really interesting way to generate worlds! I love the new preview screen btw

[@JaxiPaxified]

Congratulations on the little one, hope everything goes well. It is still looking great!

[@mattthebanana]

I love watching these update videos. It gives a sense of progression. I wishlisted it on Steam. Also, Congratulations.

[@marsmann007]

This. Is. Awesome.

[@talus14]

Ive been following this for a couple of months , Loving the content :) .

[@vidSpac]

Congrats on adding the new Sapien to the tribe

[@benrex7775]

:)

[@sakuniaben]

Amazing work! Quite interesting solution to rivers I'm currently also working on a world generation pet project and your work is an amazing inspiration for me :) keep it up!

[@aj739]

This is amazing it’s hard to believe you are doing this by your self I can’t wait for the release

[@fahlgorithm]

Wow that area at 14:28 is amazing! Makes me really excited to find an awesome place to setup a village.

[@ThePimp4dawin]

Just beautiful. This game is breathtaking.

[@sbn0671]

That's very cool! You inspire us a lot to keep programming our own game engine!

[@dannydavis8577]

Greatly appreciate and enjoy the videos, & I am thoroughly excited for the game!

[@olliesacoustics]

Hey Dave, I really love watching these updates - such a beautiful game and great work ! Can't wait to see other animals & plants being added to the world 😍 keep up the awesome work ! Ollie - Australia PS congrats on the new born ! 🎉🎉

[@itzchip9455]

Yaaas! New video I can’t even explain how much I love these videos

[@odoboj]

This looks amazing! Really inspiring. Your world will allow players to really have their own stories

[@GwenHrothgar]

Congratulations for the next child, man! About Lua: Jonathan Blow also talked that it was preferable to just ship the game with a C/C++ compiler, than to use slow interpreted languages for modding. The game looks great. Keep up the good work

[@GwenHrothgar]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/r2O6nq1nasaLoZI

[@lionkor98]

The terrain needs to be much more granular, you know, like small hills and the like. Right now the entire world feels like a desert with different colors; You could think about little cliffs, some small hills, more variation in terms of vegetation (like different colored grass, that would already add so much!) You're a huge inspiration, every time I watch these videos I get a boost of inspiration to just go and create stuff!

[@nichtmarkus647]

Really inspiring to watch these videos and see the progress

[@G4Vgamers]

im really exited to play you gameee!!! look really goood, and the thing you can do in it soound cool too, good luck with it! i will be looking all the updates!!!! Congrats for the baby!!

[@nicke20686]

Congrats on the baby!! Biomes and your river system look awesome. Just hoping the tundra biome eventually gets a little more detail and similar treatment that your grassy lush biome has.

[@arctic-1878]

First time seeing this, looks interesting! Being able to work on a project like this with only myself to answer to is a small dream, so this is inspiring!

[@Pe30Beat]

Waw, I am amazed how you can manage all of this, family, work and developing a game.

[@The1Green4Man]

It’s called passion

[@hollodollo4771]

I don't belive he is employed

[@mineman2142]

Coming along nicely dude :) good luck and keep at it

[@JamesTheFoxeArt]

Can’t wait for this game to release, I’m a fan of games that let you interact with the environment

[@zanturovahjul419]

Ooo caves and rocky mountains would be really cool, and jungles as well. This game is probably one of those that Im really looking forward to

[@magicthegatherer6903]

Have you considered adding a leadership skill? Like a sapien that can be set to tell a few others to gather a resource or build a specific structure every so often (or to harvest a farm if that ever becomes a thing)

[@bbhxskeppy814]

Add Territories: as in, when starting a world, you are brought to a screen which lets you zoom from one tribe to another and their ‘space’ is highlighted. Territory could be gradually expanded by sending people to explore. This would be a fun idea

[@Zamzeeflizzam]

Hey Dave, been watching your videos for a while. Love the work! I think the world generation screen is one of the coolest things you’ve implemented so far. Just a tip with it though - the buttons for the World Name and Seed don’t really look like buttons. I think the player could miss those. You might want to make a defined edge for the top and the right side of the buttons. Keep up the great work and congratulations on the baby!

[@travisguthrie1839]

Game is looking awesome! Congrats on the new family member!

[@sanojLeOne]

I think erosion would look real good with this system.

[@aldini9329]

What game has erosion effects that's an insane thing to do with an entire team

[@earth4180]

@@aldini9329 well, no. Erosion is doable but it's a very heavy (computational) load and when doing terrain generation like this in real-time it's near impossible not to cause frame drops or even lag

[@aldini9329]

@@earth4180 what are we talking about here erosion with deposition isnt possible at all but if you.mean a cycle where it just randomly deposits sediment and put it back that's fine but useless realistic deposition is impossible right now

[@droopmoose]

You're uploading at 3am... On that grind huh? Actually you're in a different time zone. Europe? Isn't that later? Idk I'm drunk. But good shit man I can't wait to play this and give you what little money I have. I typed this as fast as possible to be first, but for real the progress you're making is ridiculous. If big ass corporations like Activision had 10 people as motivated and inspired as you, video games would be 10× better than the shit we have now. Keep it up homie

[@UltraBot]

He is from New Zealand, mid-late afternoon there. I'm loving his work too.

[@grimsby2014]

New Zealand, I think. Might be wrong.

[@Mortizul]

He's clearly a Kiwi.

[@amo-rose]

It think being able to interact friendlily with other tribes (trade of resource, knowledge, offerings etc) would be really interesting as that is what I love in similar games. Also, making civilizations near rivers should be really profitable, especially to interact with others. Thanks for the updates, loving the game so far :D

[@brettgoldsmith8584]

Exciting! Edit: make sure you allow for Hunter gatherer type tribes as well as settlers. I want to hunt some mammoths

[@sloppyjoseph9196]

looks great!

[@ai-spacedestructor]

looks interesting, adding it to wishlist and coing to follow the development to see how it continues.

[@moonmail3422]

Don't forget to have rivers that generate from mountains! snow melt is a thing.

[@bazyt1]

This is looking very very impressive 👍

[@GamePuppetsStudio]

Amazing work!

[@Thomazmllm]

Please add a lot of marshes too! =D ohhhhhh congratz on the baby!

[@Endrw]

daddy dave back at it again

[@Grantis]

Congrats on your baby!

[@AvatarProductionStudio]

Honestly the work you have done so far. Is amzing And really makes me think of that show. The human tree And dont know if you have seen it. But it's worth a look up. And making this into an evolution game would be ground breaking Where terran and climate alter the traits and appearance of the NPCs And if it's a third person view that you want to stick with. Just imagine how you can take this game. An I'm sure you can even Change it and release several games with the same base An idle viewing experience Or a strategy game. Or a civilization builder So many possibilities with what you have started And been a long time in coming the last 5 years Just looking forward to the release !

[@blatheblathe3rd852]

noiccceeeee

[@The1wsx10]

c++ modding sounds great. having the scripts is good, and would probably be most mods. but for the really large overhauls and things, having the core of them in native should be a really big help.

[@FemtoSecn]

Man am really looking up to this game. Keep it up and congrats 👍

[@KeirRice]

Good luck with the next few weeks! On the rivers, minute physics has a great video on why rivers curve. I think the randomness could use a pass of river curves over the top.

[@DreapsterAtRoblox]

Also a pattern I notice which makes it looks a little less organic and not like real planetary terrain is that there is no continental shift a lot more than often pieces don't connect from the continent its drifting from they just look like random cookie cutter spots cut out rather than pieces broken off from older land masses I don't know if that's intentional but it's easier to sense predictable generation even if it does look nice

[@nn6404]

having more sheer cliffs and physically intraversable terrain would be amazing. Like I'm imagining mesas with huge gorges for rivers. Or tall pillar mountains like you'd get in China. You're getting somewhere with these river valleys being the starting points for the tribes. I think that a lot of this game could derive from how you interact with the landscape. Especially given the way that you've built the physics engine.

[@mcrafterzz2447]

Some ideas: Add saplings so that you can replant trees Make the grass regrow over dirt when there isn't an object on top of it so that it looks natural when you place terrain. Seasons and weather. Imagine some thunder for example which would make the people hide inside. Would be really cool!

[@NeroPop]

This game is looking so good can’t wait to play!

[@bondunkulus7648]

Loving how the game is coming along :) I think that rather than making weapons and putting them on the floor, maybe you could make weapon racks that the people will take from and when they're done they put it back. Or maybe use both :)

[@orangutaunthefirst3313]

This game looks so amazing man I’m so hyped

[@benrex7775]

I like this change. The worlds are getting more interesting with every Devlog. And if I look at your forum I can see that I'm not the only one who likes a realistic landscape. And a good waterflow is the backbone of a realistic world. Is there a way to copy a world so that several people can play on their own version of the same world? Something like an overall seed, not just the seed for the random number generator. And congrats to your baby. Why do you have 4 children? That's quite a lot nowadays. Quite a few families around me have semi-big families as well and I plan to have that as well at some point. But if you look at national averages it's kind of rare.

[@MrN1c3Guy100]

I guess you have a lot of work ahead of you but this looks better and better with every video!

[@majarimennamazerinth5753]

I think Toki Pona has great potential as a lore-language in games.

[@neinherman9989]

Looking great! Would be cool if you're able to add fjords at some point :)

[@triskop1047]

Congrats on babby Frampton!!! Also can't wait for release!

[@Dalpidar]

I think this type of project is so cool. World building and realistic survival games are the future of gaming. Keep it up.

[@TheStupidGuyWithBlip]

I think you should start rivers with a random width value, which decides how many times it can split off. Each time it does, the branches split a random amount of the width among them.

[@Madman5465]

Congratulations with the baby!

[@lobsterbark]

Kinda tangentially related, but I've noticed that there is this sort of aesthetic that your game has that it seems like Australians like a lot. The fonts and way you set up the ui and icons especially show this off a lot, but your choice of colors and the specific way you simplified things and made them cartoony is something I've only seen Australian things do. Where does that come from? Do you know? Or is is just this thing that looks good to you and seems obvious?

[@UmmerFarooq-wx4yo]

One of the other problems in this video was the lack of "North Atlantic Drift" ie a warm channel flow. Rivers exist because of flow of warm water risen then cooled on mountain tops and hills and then flowing down. While salty oceans exist as they are oozes of the terrain below, and effectively terrain in themselves. Rivers, clouds, one could say are a lot more like npcs.

[@kingsempire4270]

Wait a minute, YOU'RE the person who made blockheads? That's awesome.

[@rachard]

KZbin Reccomended this to me *Now im hyped for the game*

[@matthewgrotke1442]

Fabulous! Very impressive deciding to start with rivers. As someone who has done significant mod programming with the Source engine, I totally support your decision to use small modular C binaries as a plugin system. It's really the best option for performance. For security reasons, however, you do have to be cautious when players start posting pre-compiled mods. I know it's more work for you, but perhaps you could include a built-in compiler with the game, and force users to write mods in plain text only. Your built-in compiler would then take the plain source file and insert a unique key (a const or something based on the hash of the source) and your game would check for that key to ensure the mod was locally-compiled. That way, at least people would be able to review the mods they download.

[@matthewgrotke1442]

The nicest plugin system for modders is an event based system, where your game defines a bunch of events and mods have the opportunity to subscribe to events. It could be as simple as you have a bunch of folders. Like a folder called Player_Jump would correspond to the Player_Jump event and your game would run every mod in that folder whenever the player jumped. You could simply name the mods "0.mod", "1.mods", 2.mod", etc or whatever to determine the order of execution, although a more robust mechanism would involve some sort of mod registration screen where the user could move their run order up/down or temporarily disable them from within the game. For security reasons the mod files should only be plain text. Each start of the game, an integrated compiler will hash them, add security features, and dump their blobs into a single binary. If you compile the mods yourself, you can do some simple checks on their dependencies to ensure they aren't accessing resources they should be. You can check that all their variables are in the local scope (defined and used only within functions). Since the mods would run and immediately exit whenever called, they would have no ability to store persistent data across the life of the game. You could consider providing a game API that allows them to store and retrieve variables.

[@More_Row]

Very neat globe view man.

[@cjshakes]

Hey quick question! Although its hard to explain.. So are you going to have some sort of "scaling up management" that occurs as your civilization progresses? A much easier question! Will there be hostile npc villages? Or maybe actual diplomacy with some being hotheaded and others more nuetral or friendly? You can ignore the rest below if I'm totally off. Just trying to explain the possibilities. I hope to see your response! (or you can write these down for your next FAQ video!) What comes to my mind is how Spore did it. What I imagine is you begin with individual people and their needs as well as building individual houses, wall by wall. Then once you reach some milestone you place prebuilt houses or workshops (whether designed by the player or yourself). There'd be some mechanic of clicking and dragging for roads and farms. Also, you would no longer care about individual peoples hunger but whether there is enough food, beds, etc. Maybe a happiness boost for private living or improved houses? I imagine this level of management could be successfully scaled up the whole way to space-age stuff.

[@hurktang]

I don't know if you want this information or not, but rivers are more sinuous in steep terrain and harder soil. And type of ground will also play a massive role in biomes. At this point you might go all the way with the idea of generating the mineral type of the terrain.

[@Rossilaz58]

It's all coming together!

[@tremort.3751]

I’m looking forward to the next video, it’s been a month already 😬. A quick one will do it, tho. It’s just that they are really cool to watch