Drunk On Nectar - A Nature Sandbox Game

[VSZ]

@Galeon;481994

@VSZ Awesome work. Can you change the flying camera and make “follow smooth” instead of being attached directly to the insect because it looks too rigid ?

Hey Galeon, thanks for the feedback! Are you talking about the camera for flying creatures (bees/butterflies) or the spider? I have a simple “follow smooth” setup but the interp speeds are very high at the moment.

Btw I’ve seen you contribute to so many WIP threads, thanks a lot for your involvement and work in encouraging so many devs in this forum, it is deeply appreciated.

@ZenrokStudios;481921

Very inspiring progress and great idea. Hope it all works out for you!

Thanks for the wishes! Just remembered I haven’t checked out your new videos of Wormhole City; will take a look when I get some time.

@Capsup;481856

So how does your procedural fauna work in a technical way? Are you manually calculating and creating procedural meshes over time using something like Procedural Mesh | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation or do you have individual stem, leaf and fern meshes that you procedurally place on a ‘base’ stem and then you rotate + scale this network of small meshes over time while simultaneously correct the position of the meshes such that they appear to ‘grow’ longer in length?

@Capsup - thank you for asking this! Your second guess is right - each flora is a collection of many tiny meshes attached to each other at cardinal points to make a full plant. Some use morph targets, others animate their scale/rotation/position/material WPO/ over lifetime. A visual state machine on top of this allows transition to growth stages, seasonal variations, etc. Normally the performance of something this would be unacceptable but thanks to the Unreal’s HISM (hierarchical instanced static meshes), aggressive visibility culling and a system under the hood that constantly switches meshes between instanced and un-instanced versions on demand (ever morning when a flower blooms it needs to switch back to an un-instanced version so it can run morph targets and instances back when it is done), performance is good. Last year I managed to simulate around tens of thousands of such plants at 60 FPS. The game has grown much more complex since then and I frankly doubt I can reach that level again but I’ll be happy with even 1000 plants at 60 FPS at this point - even a tiny leaf has complex collision enabled so spiders can walk on it with feet properly grounded.

For adding new species to the game I use a visual front-end I’ve built to quickly join meshes together using a “Flora Masterplan” which controls both morphology and lifecycle events.

Like this:

I still need to create UMG widgets for making this player friendly - a daunting task because when the system was first written I never had player customization in mind. Obviously for players to use all this it needs to be very simple, very clean and easily understandable to anyone with a non-technical background.

I might investigate actual procedural meshes for players to customize basic shapes in the designer but that is a very very distant dream - Fauna also needs organic animations of legs and other body parts so it is far more challenging.