Hello!

This blog was created in 2012, but here I am resurrecting it. The option to create a new blog disappeared when I deleted another old blog that had no articles.

Anyways, please ignore the previous entries, because they are really old and outdated. The code shown in those blogs do not work with LE 4, and I don't even think I have the engine that was released around 2012.

To catch up a bit; back then I ended up doing contract work with various game engines, then getting the job/career I have now, and I work on personal 2D/3D projects when I get the time. Time is expensive lately, and I'm sure it is for most.

I had no work and a large web related contract fell through, and I ended up purchasing Leadwerks on Steam. I was in the middle of finding random new engines or rendering libraries I've never tried before. I saw Leadwerks during the sale, made my purchase on July 7th, and started reading the API.

I got nostalgic reading the API and tutorials. Leadwerks 2 with BlitzMax. It was excellent. During those times I had a "Blogger" blog showing my progress learning the engine. I made a bunch of post-process shaders (which I actually need to do again), a day and night cycle, dynamic clouds, and so forth. Great times. So, I started another blog.

Laziness and lack of time prevented me from also writing here. I wasn't sure when I started if I would even make a game. I'm still not sure. My day job is fairly relaxed right now, but it often jumps into 12 hour days at times during the Summer. Maybe I can get myself to keep returning even if I only have 30 minutes of time available.

Now, to explain the map used as my Featured Photo. That is the result of my Biome Generator. Technically, it's just written in C++, but overall it's for a Leadwerks project. You can think of it as a Minecraft clone, but I don't like the word "clone." I will have custom gameplay, points of interest, and so on. I don't have a copy of Minecraft source code either, so my results are from trial and error. Procedurally generated terrain is the shared major difference, and the decision to use blocky art.

The biome map shown is actually seed #18446744073709551614 (not joking) and is 2048x2048. This is roughly 8 regions worth (8 chunks, and each chunk has 16 blocks) and has 40 different biomes, which include mixed/blended biomes, and generated under the constraints of a temperature map. If you look closely, it includes rivers, ponds, even beaches and coasts.

You can read more detail about those development days here: https://leadwerks-scavenge.blogspot.com/2023/07/biome-generation.html

The attached images are the results from development yesterday into this morning (date of this blog posted - yes, I'm tired). It's entirely experimental, but it's basically what I want. I need caves under the ground, and in the end it looks like several layers of caves in a single 16x16 chunk.. I think. At the end I threw in some textures so it wasn't just white. I have a LOT of work to do to add all of the block types.

Thanks to SpiderPig for the SimplexNoise library!

If you want to read the details you can here: https://leadwerks-scavenge.blogspot.com/2023/07/3d-landscapes.html

Starting on the next blog I will write it on Leadwerks first, and then copy & paste over to Blogger. I may just leave Blogger out of it from now on.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. The game name is "Scavenge." The name "Scavenge" is actually the name of a game I had designed on paper meant for a post-apocalyptic world. It's too ambitious for a single person with no extra budget. I'm stealing the name from myself for this project.