This is not a hill I want to walk

I am not happy with this hillside.

One thing I am learning is just how much development time ends up being spent on refinement.

The first version of the world generator was actually quite quick to build. Getting mountains, valleys and generally believable terrain appearing was not especially difficult. The problem only became obvious once I started spending more time actually playing in it.

There was too much similarity between the features.

So I started adding more variation. Cliffs, sharper ridges, overhangs and generally more interesting terrain.

The problem is that it is very easy to confuse more detail with better terrain.

What I eventually ended up creating was vast quantities of noise.

This hillside is a pretty good example. In a screenshot, you could probably argue that it looks interesting. There is plenty going on, lots of shape and plenty of variation.

It is also absolutely horrible to walk across.

Evolve needs a world that looks worth crossing and that you can actually cross. The same constraint applies to the dinosaurs. If a player can only get over a slope by hopping every half metre, a herd cannot path it particularly well either.

A one metre riser is a step. Two metres is a wall.

This slope is the worst of both.

It never becomes a cliff you naturally go around, and it never becomes ground you can simply walk across. It is just stairs all the way down, with a tuft of grass on every tread.

That is the balance I have been chasing in the generator.

Dramatic terrain is fine. A mountain you remember is fine. Cliffs and overhangs are absolutely things I want in the world.

What I cannot have is terrain that is interesting in a screenshot but unpleasant as a place to actually play.

Plains need to be places you enjoy being in. Mountain ranges need valleys between them that you can naturally follow. Cliffs should read as cliffs, rather than every metre of the map turning into another step.

There has already been quite a bit of work towards that.

Valley floors. Limits on how much of the map a single massif is allowed to consume. Checks during world creation that use similar walk and roam tests to the ones the player and creatures actually depend on. Areas of terrain that remain on the finer half-metre resolution so that everything does not simply become one-metre terraces.

On paper, the amount of land that a dinosaur can actually roam across has improved considerably.

This screenshot is the leftover problem.

The landscape can be working correctly at a large scale and still be completely wrong in places like this.

World generation is probably going to be one of those systems that I never really consider finished. Every time I spend more time playing in the world, I notice another pattern, another awkward slope or another area that feels too repetitive.

And I think that is fine.

I will keep coming back to it and improving it.

The danger is spending forever doing that.

There are always more terrain features I could add and always another generation rule I could tweak, but at some point I also need to keep pushing forward and actually build the rest of the game.

For now, I think the world generation is good enough to continue.

The next improvement is not adding even more features on top. It is teaching the generator when a slope should flatten into something you can comfortably walk across, and when it should commit to becoming a proper face that you naturally go around.

Then I need to leave it alone for a while and build something else.