Incognita - Large Scale Procedural Generation with Biomes [Downloadable]

Community Showcase Architecture
, ,
1

Hi there. After a few years of buying interesting assets in the marketplace and reading around the forum, I’ve finally decided to sit down and work on some projects to make them useful. The result is Incognita - sort of a prototype I worked on to get more in depth with C++, and to test out a few ideas on procedural generation.

In short, Incognita creates a voxel landscape, featuring mountains, biomes, rivers, roads, buildings, and weather. The prototype is downloadable from the link at the end of this post.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AiW01rR4tr4

Please keep in mind that while the landscape is randomly generated, this isn’t No Man’s Sky, meshes (ex: trees, buildings) aren’t part of procedural generation.

So what’s next? Actually, there’s a lot to do. My final goal is to make a full game with this procedural generation as one of the main feature, but before doing so, I want to make sure the map is fun, detailed, and efficient.

https://i.imgur.com/X7zWtCf.gif

Feedbacks, questions, sharing some ideas are all welcome :slight_smile:

I’m providing the link to the demo here too since some features aren’t in the video.
Credits to the Community Ocean Project and voxel plugin. With them, I was able to get this done in a month.

Links:
Download Demo(809mb)

2 Likes
2

Wow, love the video. Those shots with all of the objects spawning in are great!

3

Thank you @TheAwesomeTh3ory , the shots took some preparation because otherwise things might spawn right at the front of the camera

The original video isn’t showing the map types, so I attach some screenshots showing that everyone can generate different types of map in the demo.

4

What a brilliant piece of work! Are you planning to go further with it?

5

Sorry for not updating here. I try to work on this project whenever I’m free, which I hope will come more often… who doesn’t anyway.

Speaking of anyway, I went off the rail and keep adding new features like waterfall and pathfinding, and even a runtime heightmap importer to the project, which makes the next version bigger (16km x 16km), more customizable, but also takes a lot longer to become stable and user friendly. Hopefully I will get something out soon.

http://i.imgur.com/BOtzaHq.png

7

Hello Wesyc,

Awesome Work. You have a new fan! We have several things in common. #1 I’m a huge fan of procedural generation. #2 I also spent a few years buying interesting markeptace assets to aggregate into a single project that could use the different themes/artstyles and my blueprints experience. #3 I want to use Voxels for deformable landscapes.

Is you Voxel System custom or one of the Voxel plugins in the marketplace?

8

It was stated and even linked in the original post that the Voxel Plugin plugin was being used.

9

AlleyKilla is right, I’m using the voxel plugin by Phyronnaz, which isn’t currently in the UE4 marketplace. When I first started, I was using the Runtime Mesh plugin by Koderz, but I switch over because the voxel plugin has a good LOD system for generating landscape.

10

Shucks, I have no idea how I overlooked that. I also purchased the Pro version of Voxel Plugin. The Voxel Importers set it part from the rest. It also has voxel water, although, I have yet to see anyone else use it. We’re definitely using Voxel Plugin in our MMO RPG Sandbox. I sure would like to push the proc generation as far as I can, with every entity type, at every layer. How far are you going with Proc Gen in Project Incognita?

OPTIONAL READING

We’re employing Proc generation in our MMO RPG for rapid story and quest creation. The intent is to provide GMs ‘hyper’ tools that allow them to get the ideas from inside their imagination out into the gameworld as fast a possible, to facilitate near-real-time interactive storytelling.

We’re doing more of Semi-Procedural design, then a fully procedural design. Proc gen will create templates which GMs and Players collaboratively customize with multi-user hyperbasher.The hard assets I planned to use is 1) Procedural Landscape Ecosystem for Landscape Materials and Foliage; 2) Dungeon Architect.to spawn Architectural/Structure templates.

11

The original project is very limited in term of getting the geography to look right, so I started from scratch using voronoi. Eventually I want to make an editor for users to define each tile parameter, like biome, terrain features, rivers, towns etc… still lots of work to do.

12

TechLord, unless something has changed the voxel water was scrapped.

15

Great work! Are you planning to release the generation system on the marketplace when it’s done?

17

This is a dream come true! If not the marketplace, some kind of guide to get the pieces of the puzzle in place? Fantastic stuff, wow.