Sorry I have been quiet for 1-2 months as I was working on a major change inside Eldiron. I hope that with the release of the next version I can keep making updates and releases more frequent as the basic components are in place.
I always thought that RPGs were perfect for creating procedural content, and as this is something I have been working on for a long time, I thought it would be good to integrate it into the core of Eldiron.
Here are my goals:
- Draw with basic geometric shapes, like walls, floors and so on.
- Have a powerful material node system for creating procedural materials for the given shapes.
- Render the created content in both 2D and 3D as required.
I was always a big fan of the pre-rendered background of games in the early 2000s, so I decided to have 2 different render modes. One is to path trace the 3D content to have great looking 3D backgrounds for isometric and orthogonal views, the other is to triangulate the procedural content and render the triangles which can happen in realtime.
Right now only the path tracing is implemented and I am just starting on the triangulation.
Here is a sneak peak.
This screenshot shows part of a world modeled using procedural content and materials. In 2D the content is drawn in real time, in 3D it is being path traced and used as a background for the dynamic content (characters, items etc). Scenes can dynamically adjust to world and local lights.
Materials and the path tracer itself are based on the Disney BSDF standard, that means that there are no limits in the possible content which can be rendered, like glass for windows or water for rivers - I am just not quite there yet with the content creation.
All of this of course co-exists with the existing tile-map based drawing system. You can mix procedural content and tiles, for example the surface of the table are tiles which are used as textures. The floor on the right in the smithy are just tiles (which are just drawn by hand).
All of this is of course just the beginning, there are only a few geometric shapes and material nodes available. However the selection will grow by every future release. Trees, rivers, stones, mountains, full houses, it will all come with time.
I will write more detailed blogs and videos soon.
Thanks,
Markus