I’ve spent much of the day today working on world terrain generation, with an emphasis on tree placement during game startup. The big thing I’ve been struggling with has been a strange bug which resulted in trees being placed in strange patterns; often in north-south or in diagonal stripes across a forest, instead of uniformly within a region.<\/p>\n
Eventually I found the issue; some uninitialised memory which was causing the game to think that forest was already present in some positions on the map. Fixing that resulted in getting a lot more trees in the world; now a standard default world has around 10,000 trees, where previously it had about 2,000 to 3,000. In order to keep reasonable performance, I made some simplifications to the tree model generation, some visible, and some imperceptible. Oddly enough, I think I like the simpler trees more; the faceted, low-polygon appearance gives them some character that they were lacking, before. Still no substitute for proper, artist-created models, but they’ll do for the moment.<\/p>\n\n\t\t