I can certainly understand that. I am working on a board-game style market simulation game and need to randomly generate worlds with resources and businesses.
I’m slowly going through your old threads, but immediately got a bit confused. In 1.0 you talk about making Vector Fields but I don’t think I understand what you mean by that. Between the term Vector Field and that chart example you show, I really have no idea what you are doing In any case I still have a lot more to read and hopefully despite me lack of knowledge I will pick up a trick or two that will help me without encroaching on your awesomeness
The vector field is just an array that holds the vector of every tile. You just need to work out the math of where every tile will be placed, then store it so you can spawn tiles and change things down the line. Then, you have other arrays that match that data structure so all your data is synced with each tile.
For now you can just raise the loop limit. In the project settings(general tab IIRC) there is a setting that will let you raise the iteration limit to ~2 billion. It will be something like 1-10 million default.
Ultimately though, you are going to want to spread your generation over the tick. So instead of doing 5000 loops immediately, freezing the FPS, it spreads it out so the FPS keeps at least a constant 20-30 while the generation processes. This slows generation time down, but lets you have a loading bar, keep the music going, etc.
I hired a developer to work on a project for me in Unity3D. We did the base framework with the Grid asset bellow, but now and I am evaluating migrating to UE because of better physics (FLEX) and also unmatched photorealism. Looking for grids assets I didn’t find any that suit our project but then I found your amazing map!
Those guys are also influenced by Amit Patel’s work li you! ; )
[QUOTE=;417838]
You could overlay a grid on top of a 2d mesh. The grid is just an array of vectors, so as long as you know how to line up the vectors you can do it.
[QUOTE=;417838]
But I mean to have the 2D mesh automatically converted into a grid each time I import a new 2D mesh.
What I want is to wrap the 3D geometry of the grid, on a custom 3D mesh (like the Unity grid asset example bellow). Do you think it could do this?
Would you be interested in knowing more about it, and maybe help on this project?
So you want to import a mesh, and have a grid generated based on that mesh? Just the physical(collision-wise) exterior of the mesh, or all throughout? I am sure could do that, but it is beyond the scope of my work, and unfortunately I don’t have time for projects besides my own.
Sorry for the late reply. Bethesda just destroyed a few weeks of my productivity…
You only want the grid to be on the exterior of the mesh, such as a sphere for a planet, or some other convex mesh? Also, whether you need these grid points evenly spaced, or just numerous enough to cover your mesh, is something you will need to consider when looking for a solution.
Basically you would have to figure out how to translate your mesh into a series of data points(vectors to start with) for use in your grid. I don’t think blueprint has anything that would be much help here(you should still sift through the context menu and do some searching), though there might be a plugin that could give you the coordinates for each vertex in the mesh. Rama’s plugin might do that.
If there isn’t a plugin or node to suit your needs, then you might devise a scheme to trace all over the mesh and use those points as the grid points, assuming you are looking at a convex mesh that doesn’t have hidden cavities you want grid points inside of.
I’ve been evaluating Unreal Engine for a game and am pretty much sold - I want to procedurally generate 50-60 star systems and did a google search to see how I might go about that in unreal, and stumbled on this thread.
I don’t know if you have any game dev experience, but I was a complete noob when I first started, so I am of the mind that you can practically do anything you want if you take it brick by brick.
This. This is awesome! As a newbie, to unreal at least, this gives me hope that I can get up to speed; specifically, reading through each of your map generator posts.
Procedural generation is a big thing for me, probably the number one reason why my one game design project/effort of too many years never sees finish. Proper random world, grid, and scene generation gives me the immersion I want in a game.
I understand at some point you may release this to the market, I suspect many will cry if you don’t, have you considered releasing your v1 for others to learn from?
No plans for a marketplace release unfortunately. If it ever happened it would be post release for my project, but even then I can’t imagine the amount of tech support and documentation I would have to provide for over 100MB of core blueprints.
I could see releasing V1, though it doesn’t exist anymore so I would have to create it from scratch. It would be so basic though that you would probably be better off figuring out how to place hexes next to each other on your own.
I am more interested in your simulation model than any of your graphical components. From what I have gathered through reading of your map generator posts you have modeled the creation based on other fields understanding, land mass location from tectonics, and weather patterns mapping to terrain features. Why reinvent the wheel, I would rather give credit and build faster to my dream game. For me each cell you create your data for would contain the “theme” data for that world cell/area.
I am not new to coding and game design/theory, but definitely new to unreal, it is unreal and very overwhelming. I am having troubles understanding the community on one regard, well several actually. Many have created either awesome projects or niche tools but they are wary of releasing because of support concerns, why not just release on an as-is/no-support basis and price accordingly? I have not reviewed the marketplace with any scrutiny as I feel I have to much to learn right now to be concerned with it, so this maybe a superfluous question.
Well support isn’t the primary reason, but it is a significant one.
I strongly feel that this map generator is better than those found in AAA strategy games, even Civilization, and that isn’t something I am going to give away cheaply without releasing my own game with it first. And I generally don’t need the money that a marketplace release would provide.
I can answer questions though and help guide you towards your own system. The core of this generator is Voronoi cell generation, which isn’t too complicated once you get the hang of it. I have screens of my distance checking functions in these threads. The tectonics really boils down to Voronoi cells generating within Voronoi cells, which is also explained in the thread.
It may sound like Greek to you, but I think in the end it is extremely hard to wrap your brain around a lot of this without having implemented it in the first place. For instance I could take 's toolkit and use it for pathfinding, but without having the basic understanding of building a pathfinding system from the ground up I don’t think I would have the background necessary to innovate in that area as I intend to.
Love the work you’ve done man. Definitely inspiring. I’m working on my own system, definitely going to be borrowing heavily from the things that you’ve discussed on your threads. I’ve set up my grid up, and I’m now starting to work out the first parts of generating the land masses.
I love the idea of playing on an actual globe, so while the trick made for you here is really awesome, I’m going for broke:
Yeah I considered the 12 pentagon route but it doesn’t fit my data structure. I don’t know how you would order your data structure with pentagons, but I do know that it would be completely incompatible with everything I have done. If you are beginning to work on this, then it is good that you solved that early.
We have actually reverted back to the flat map for development. There are a few things with the projection that we aren’t quite comfortable with so we will take another look at them later in development. Particle effects/animation and projection, getting the on-click accuracy to be seamless, etc.
I am not sure if I will post much more in these threads regarding progress in the map generator. Maybe some updates when I start to make different seed modes such as continent, pangaea, etc. Most of the features are basically there, but they have been completely rewired from an organizational standpoint as compared to what I have posted in this thread.
I may do a similar thread series on unit pathfinding when I really start to delve into that. Right now we are putting a lot of effort into UI and a map editor.
Just chiming in to say that I very much enjoy following this thread, so I hope you won’t stop with updates entirely; at least not if you add any new features. But if you consider the generator pretty much done and are mostly cleaning up and rewiring stuff I can see what you mean. In any case I’m a day one customer for whatever game you end up making with this generator
In any case I still have a lot more to read and hopefully despite me lack of knowledge I will pick up a trick or two that will help me without encroaching on your awesomeness 
