| Portfolio | https://jamesjarman.dev |
| Project Hex | https://blog.jamesjarman.dev/hex |
| Devblog | https://blog.jamesjarman.dev |
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesjarmandev/ |
There we go. 300 hex chunks. 250,000 trees. 1000 draw calls. 100 FPS. All the trees vary in size and shade, and sway in the wind based on position. I love GPU instancing!
The draw calls are higher than you'd expect because each chunk handles its own instancing, but this is acceptable as I'm never going to load anywhere near this many chunks at once.
I've been fixing a few issues that have been on my todo list before moving on with actual gameplay. I wanted to get the trees GPU instanced so reimplemented the tree swaying as a shader. I love the silliness you get mid implementation! 😂
I have finally got to the point where I can take my infinite hex terrain tech and move it towards the game idea I have. I've blown up the size of the chunks and each chunk has subhexes that can be used to spawn entities. Including trees... lots and lots of trees (the tree Perlin noise check has been disabled while I test the subhexes).
This is my late #Introduction.
Hi, my name is James and I’m a #GameDev based in Bristol, UK. Video games have always been part of my life and at this point I’m part of the old guard.
I’m not happy unless I’m working on a game project. I love #ProcGen and have an unhealthy obsession with hexagons (hexagons are the bestagons). Fluent in both #Unity and #UnrealEngine. I’ve also made a lot of my own tech over the years.
At the moment I’m working on a cozy hex-based infinite #ProcGen game in #UE5.
I've got this really nice light wind loop going on now. The tree sway step is synchronised for all trees regardless of time of creation, but I've slightly offset it based on world X position to make it look like the breeze travels across the screen. There's also a minor variation in sway amount. What do you all think?
Trees have been successfully attached to the ground. Now working on some windy tree swaying.
Yea, I'm having way too much fun with this 😂
I now have resource nodes (trees and rocks) spawning with the chunks. All looks perfectly normal, right? Cool. Task complete.
Finally found some time to work on my personal project and have been putting rocks into the chunk generation only for some of them to appear like they've fallen over or even spawned completely upside down.
Please note there is zero code in there for any kind of rotation. I eventually want variation but I'm not there yet. Very bizarre!
I have been experimenting with a shader that can draw the lines for both tri and quad edges (a sort of pseudo-wireframe shader) for my trees and other static meshes. Seems to be working decently enough. I'm embarrassed how long it took me to create that tree in Blender. I have no idea how 3D artists are able to put up with that terrible UX 😅