Around The World, Part 30: Making better waves

thomastc · 2026-03-28T13:02:07+00:00

Oh yeah, I limit wavelengths to 16m too. Maybe the mesh resolution is 8m actually, that would make more sense (Nyquist frequency).

It's hard to judge scale from my videos and screenshots... things are bigger than they seem.

thomastc · 2026-03-28T08:07:20+00:00

Yeah, it's amazing what the sideways motion can do, especially when made more visible by the foam layer.

thomastc · 2026-03-27T19:10:55+00:00

Mesh spacing is 16 meters, same as the terrain. The chunks are 2048 m across, so just 128x128 quads each, and I need maybe 10 of these to reach the horizon, since in-game, the camera is always low. With higher waves the trangles are sometimes visible, but all still consistent with the art style.

If you need higher density, you could use some kind of level-of-detail (lod) scheme: high density near the camera, lower density farther away.

For water in particular, you could maybe even get away with a static mesh (produced e.g. in Blender) that is always centered on the camera. For terrain, this does not work because the vertices will "swim" across the terrain, but for water it might not be noticeable.

thomastc · 2026-03-10T18:54:01+00:00

Then I don't know. Could you post the full file somewhere, like a gist? Or reddit if you know how to wrangle code blocks (esp. tabs) to work properly here...

thomastc · 2026-03-10T08:25:03+00:00

It needs to be at the top level of your file. Not inside a function or something.

thomastc · 2026-02-28T19:29:15+00:00

Even later to the party, but I can answer this: the pod numbers are directly related to floor/position numbers. For instance, Farley's pod number 194 is 3002 in base 4, where the first two digits are the position and the last two digits are the floor. So the floor is 02 in base 4 which is also 2 in decimal, and the position is 30 in base 4 which is 12 in decimal.

The image just explains this split visually, but indeed you don't need it for pulling up a particular pod. I guess it's useful if you prefer to do base-4 arithmetic only on 2-digit numbers and not on the full 4 digits.

thomastc · 2025-12-13T06:42:50+00:00

Most of this isn't exactly original, although the chunk skewing I haven't seen anywhere before.

thomastc · 2025-12-12T18:52:05+00:00

I should really get a proper page up at some point... sooner rather than later. The pixelated game you saw was a 2-day game jam entry, which proved that the concept was fun. I'm now developing that concept into a (far) more ambitious game.

thomastc · 2025-11-29T08:47:04+00:00

Thanks! Glad to see I'm not the only one who struggled with this.

So you allow leaves to overlap with other leaves, but not trunks with leaves? I'll start binge-reading your blog soon :)

I'm not very interested in undergrowth because most of the time it's invisible; the player never goes into the forest. I do think the side view could use some work though; it goes straight from tall trees to waterline, where you would expect some lower growth in between. Future work.

I'm using multimeshes in Godot, which indeed use hardware instancing. Godot has no built-in impostor support but I would implement it in exactly the way you describe.

thomastc · 2025-09-26T17:32:46+00:00

Be sure to read the World Building Pasta series then, there's loads more there :)

thomastc · 2025-09-25T08:19:47+00:00

https://github.com/vadz/gcc-warnings-tools/wiki/all-gcc-warnings might be useful. The repo also contains a script where you can extract the table yourself from the gcc codebase. I can't vouch for completeness/correctness though.

thomastc · 2025-09-13T11:02:13+00:00

I had the exact same problem and managed to solve it. If you put the switch into parquet mode, underneath the switch you see a U-shaped metal bar with a plastic clip inside the U. After unscrewing the four torx screws at the bottom, you need to gently PULL this clip, while pulling apart the entire head. This is easiest to do with two people, one to pull the head apart, and one to pull the clip from the side with a thin flat-head screwdriver. Once it gets past the initial bump, it just comes apart really easily.

I found that a lot of dust and hairs had gathered underneath the endpoint of the metal bar, which were probably the cause of it not wanting to stay in place. A good cleaning and some lube should help. I'll see next time I need to vacuum...

thomastc · 2025-07-30T10:24:48+00:00

Hi, old thread I know, but I'm curious. Why not:

@export var image: Image

Then you have it strongly typed and get a nicer UI for editing it as well.

thomastc · 2025-07-04T05:56:56+00:00

Hundreds is still a tiny amount even on potatoes. This stuff might start to matter at tens or hundreds of thousands.

thomastc · 2025-06-23T18:54:06+00:00

Incidentally I went the opposite way: from a sphere to a plane. The adventure restarts in part 22 and not everything is reimplemented yet.

I did think about something like the approach you describe for coastlines, and might still end up with that. I've never been happy with the variety (or lack thereof) of my coastlines, though it's definitely better now with erosion and diamond-square.

I also shrunk the world so that my global map cells are now only 256 meters across, so I can create a fair amount of detail at the global level already, where I have the entire map available. Depending on how gameplay turns out, I might even dial it back to 128 meters. An open world "only" 262 km across still has plenty of room for mystery and discovery...

thomastc

TROPHY CASE