Continuing Map Overhaul part 4 (Patreon)

I got a lot done over the weekend. Starting with the river and the new shader that accompanies it:

Water is a hard egg to crack. Especially for VR. It is so complex and noisy that it is difficult to come up with a good looking and performant solution, especially for VR. However, my profession IRL involves shaders so I managed to whip up something that looks good and is cheap to render. The shader generates a good looking pseudo noise pattern to get that flickery water effect on the surface. It also has reflections, water depth, and moss. Water depth and moss are handled by reading the color of the river model's vertex channel. Thereby allowing me to "paint in" where the deep parts of the water and mossy parts should be:

Results:

All of this is done in a single render pass. Including the moss which also picks up the shadows.

I am roughly 80% done with the map. I spent some time on other features of the game including the VR implementation of horseback riding. This is a tricky problem because of nausea. Getting on a virtual horse and seeing your body move at a very fast pace without actually moving induces some serious motion sickness. I had to take a 5 minute break in between the many forms of driving implementations that I tried. I've managed to reduce it by quite a lot but it still needs some work. I will be keen on hearing feedback for this when the Beta releases.

Other then that it is really fun! I originally tried to make it so the horse is controlled by the physical movements of your hands like if you are actually whipping the horse to move forward, but it's very difficult without knowing the direction of the player's torso and at the moment most users don't have torso tracking. So driving the horse will be done by using the buttons on your VR controller, like walking. By next devpost you should see the loli riding with me behind.

I also modeled and implemented a nature system for harvesting and growing materials. Wheat has been implemented and it grows in certain parts of the map. It's not ready to show off but with this system you can repeatedly take wild wheat from the wild plants that grow in the canyon scape.

I am aiming to have this Beta released next Monday-ish. I will be recording and uploading a Coming Soon YouTube video showcasing the new environment and the loli horseriding mechanics this upcoming weekend. Almost there.

Stay tuned.