Decorative experiment: Beanslime (Patreon)

I’ve started making some experiments with new decoratives, more specifically the low groundcover types. There will be larger bush type decoratives too, but the groundcover ones are more important because of how they interact with tilesets.

I like how this yellow bean-like slime mould is shaping up but it looks a bit strange on grassy tilesets. It seems to work well on dirt though.

This isn’t part of map generation, I’m just playing around with hand-placing the test assets as I’m painting them.

A lot of my time from the last few weeks has gone into things that will never be very visible but needs to be done. My mods add many more natural tiles than the base game and managing all that gets difficult.

The game has ways to interact with tiles. Footstep dust, vehicle particles from driving, and bits of terrain that goes flying if you throw a grenade.

Every tile has a unique set of all these different effects, for example, one type of grass tileset might have dust, grass, and sticks, but another type of grass might have a different amount of grass, and tiny rock particles in different amounts.

It doesn’t stop there, every tile also has its own unique set of particles that are colour-corrected for the tile it is spawning from. A lot of the particles are similar but with different tints, but they’re still treated as unique particles each with a unique name.

In the base game all this sort of thing is done as huge lists of static content. The advantage is that it’s easy to make fine-tune adjustments because all the data is fully expended and editable.

For me though, at this prototyping stage, building out and maintaining all that data is a nightmare. Instead I’ve been building some tools and systems to automate a lot of the process for me. That way I can do things like define patterns for groups, like “grass” as a broader concept of tile type, and then a lot of the secondary can be generated procedurally. For example, it might be that some alien vegetation has dark teal leaves but reddish solid, stand mini-cliff transitions with water, (and a few other things) and then the system should be able to generate all of the interaction effects lists and unique particles for me.

It’s working pretty well but it was more work than I expected because it turns out that there are more special rules or permutations than it first seemed.

I’ve also been looking at tileset transitions. Tilesets have transitions with other tiles so it’s not a hard square edge. Those transitions also have transitions with other transitions if 3 or more tiles touch. This is fortunately something where the game engine already encourages grouping tiles by types. The downside is that for me it’s not just water, grass, dirt, sand, and concrete. Now I have snow, ice, moss, fungus, lava, rock, mud, and a number of other types, so the set of possible combinations is going to be much larger. For now I’m just going to implement something basic and temporary. It will be easier to plan a better system when the list of tilesets is more final.