Oh well since i started the damn thread I may as well carry on, the above worked a beaut, and when i get up tomorrow should deus ex not win, i’ll be trying some inverse perlin heightmaps to poke lakes into my terrain generated
So what i’m pondering now is rivers, I was looking at ‘From Dust’ and I thought it was perfectly reasonable something like that could be done in unity so, maybe you guys could come up with some ideas but my idea was to make a Texture2D from the final terrain heightmap (I think my generation will go like, jagged perlin, smooth it, normalise it then apply ‘islandification’ then bump lakes into it (And the lakes have to be way above sea level) and then I have my ‘playground’… i was also thinking of some way of cutting ridges into it so my playground denizens can get get some air if they fly off a clifftop too fast
I digress i’m a bit tired, but yes after the full terrain is done, would the course of rivers best be done by choosing a point on the final generated heightmap as a Texture2D then just testing each pixel at the current pixels border and go with the darkest (lowest) one, like this until it reaches a dead end (in which it just pushes over the lowest higher pixel) and so on until it reaches the ‘sea’ (which i guess it could recognise by just giving the sealevel of the heightmap texture a colour to test against.
With that basic process there, could i take a sample pixel every 5-10 pixels placed and use it to place a node from the excellent river path tool and then its course be mapped and the placement of river be automated, maybe if there was a lot of hunting during the river course generation that could make for wider rivers
The real point of this is that i’l like rivers to be made from within the game, so, would the above be possible in realtime, and would it be possible to have the rivertool deform the terrain over time as the river makes its way to the sea?
I’m just rambling I guess but i’d really like to make this happen, perhaps using the river tool for rivers as it is a spline with suitable uv mapping and i was thinking of possibly using ragespline for want of an alternative to draw spline shapes around lakes so they keep their shape properly, unless someone knows some other way of having a filled curved shape that can easily be reshaped
And i’ve been looking into shaders of course too, i havent got pro so it’s lucky my implementation wouldnt use reflection/refraction, but i saw the water shader by unity guys had a texture for where it met the mainland - could this idea suit riverbanks too?
Sorry for the ramble i’m just trying to see what can be done