Flag Hippo Games

It’s been a while since the last DevLog. The main reason – the complexity of building Scottish fields.

This is an example of a field pattern in Scotland. Probably hasn’t changed hugely in the last 150-200 years. Enclosure with trees/hedges/stone walls, and different crops.

I tried a few different options – initially individually crafted fields, but I quickly realised a convincing patchwork was very unlikely without a LOT of handplacement. Ideally for the base scenarios and any user created scenarios, I need to provide a lot of coverage.

Enter PCG, PCGEx plugin and Voronai fields. This allowed me to quickly create cell type shapes based on a grid of points. By manipulating these grids, I could make the kind of irregularity but with coherent shape that I need.

Some really powerful PCG nodes allow got random (but consistent) jitter across the field space. However, no sooner had I solved that problem than I found another – in a railway game, how I do consistently create tracks through this kind of lanscape.

This took a lot of problem solving. I changed direction several times. One key element is that in the fields above, there are about 70 thousand individual crops. I experimented with different approaches, but proper crops was easily the best look, especially at closer zoom levels.

Finally I got PCG sensibly working to remove points it had generated, created some space for a rail, and line the new rail route with some walls and bushes. The boundary needs a lot of work, but the concept and mechanics are there, and provides a great framework for impacting the Scottish landscape as railways grow!

Next step – stop tinkering with this, and tidy more of the train mechanics. Next DevLog will go through some of the Train buying and placing mechanics, but route selection needs a bit more work.