u/lewster32

Progress on my nearly fully procedural world for the game I've been working on for most of this year. This is one of the test islands, used to let me tweak the generation in a controlled way. This one is all about the mountain at the centre... and more importantly, what's contained within.

It's come a long way since I posted a few months ago; visually I think it's a lot more interesting. It's much, much more optimised (though there's quite a bit of unwanted pop-in and other visual issues I'm working to address) hence how I can now do a fly-through rather than a walk-through.

All of the meshes, textures, materials, and most of the sounds (excluding the water at the very start) are procedurally generated. The installer is currently a 7mb exe file!

The tech stack is Rust on the back-end, and WebView2 (Chromium, Windows only at the moment) via Tauri, running three.js as the renderer. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about any of the stuff in here; it's all the usual (and perhaps slightly naive) implementations we've seen here a thousand times before. Most of it is just liberal applications of layered noise. I'm quite proud of the net effect though, and I think that's maybe its main appeal - it's a really nice world to wander around, and that to me has really been the most important factor. So much so that the game (yes, there is one) has taken a back seat while I splurged on crafting the world.

I'll be releasing a demo sometime soonish, likely on Steam. I'll drop an update in this sub when that happens if anyone would like to take a stroll :)

The latest work-in-progress video of a short hike up from the forest to near the top of a mountain.

This is a game concept I've been working on for a while now. I'm a huge fan of Valheim; I find its art style and world generation truly beautiful. For ages now I've wanted to have a crack at making a really interesting natural 3D world, bringing together some pretty well established and not really cutting-edge techniques, but wrapping them up in that cosy retro style that Valheim manages to pull off so effortlessly.

I recently finished another much tighter scoped project to make an explorable world using similar techniques, but in a post-apocalyptic setting and using much more rudimentary tech (a ray casting engine not unlike Wolfenstein 3D's) here; https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/1tsfxy9/unto_dust_a_fully_procedural_abandoned_world/

A lot of what I learned on that project has fed into this one. Many of the same principles apply, namely that the world should be fully procedural; the world and all its assets should be algorithmically derived. This means everything in the video you see is a mesh, texture or sprite created from scratch in a deterministic way from the world seed. There are exactly zero 3D mesh files, images or any other form of pre-made asset.

This one isn't going to be 'finished' for a while - I'm turning it into a standalone game, rather than a web project. The renderer is three.js and the front-end code is TypeScript (sticking to my web roots) but the back-end is Rust for better efficiency, and so I can have an authoritative client/server model for multiplayer.

I'll release more videos to the playlist it's in as the project progresses. You can already see a few older prototypes on there that show the various stages it's been through.