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[WIP] [AssetStore] [Editor Extension] World Builder

Discussion in 'Works In Progress - Archive' started by Golden-Skull-Studios, Jan 2, 2017.

  1. Golden-Skull-Studios

    Golden-Skull-Studios

    Joined:
    Jan 18, 2015
    Posts:
    39
    Hello everyone, we would like to share our work-in-progress world builder.

    About
    The world builder is intended as a versatile tool for the creation of tile-based 2D and 3D worlds.
    It will feature a big bag of in-editor and sceneview tools to paint and edit worlds easily and intuitively.
    It will support autotiles, automatic world generation (image input based & procedural).

    Further down the road we are thinking about real-time editing of worlds, infinite world generation and more.
    We are also always open to hear your ideas and requests and will gladly add them to our roadmap.

    Working features
    -Placing and removing tiles in the Sceneview
    -Selecting tiles from a tileset to draw in the sceneview
    -Placing on different heights
    -2D Autotiles (x-y axis)

    TODOs
    -Brushes (brushsizes, round brushes)
    -comprehensive Autotile creation window
    -comprehensive Tileset creation window
    -Multi-World/Chunk editing, management and storing
    -Fill Tool
    -Drag Lines, drag rectangles, drag circles
    -Create from Heightmap
    -Procedural generation
    -Prop placement
    -Performance optimization: Atlas generation, Mesh-merging
    -Runtime editing functionalities
    -A whole free out-of the box tilesets, tiles and autotiles to get started & play around with

    Trello
    We have made a public Trello board to give you an insight on our progress and give you the opportunity to provide direct feedback and vote features you wish to see sooner.
    https://trello.com/b/SfOt06Tk/gss-public

    Screenshots (WIP)



    Video

    coming soon!

    Release Date
    Early Access Version Q1/Q2 2017

    We are very interested to hear your feedback.

    Cheers,
    your GSS Team
     
  2. 00Fant

    00Fant

    Joined:
    Mar 10, 2015
    Posts:
    131
    Editor Minecraft :D nice
     
    Golden-Skull-Studios likes this.
  3. Golden-Skull-Studios

    Golden-Skull-Studios

    Joined:
    Jan 18, 2015
    Posts:
    39
    We have took the time to prepare a whole bunch of primitives to be used for grid-based world building and have made a really sloppy and quick test. The building made some issues apparent and some lacking primitives needed for the roofs and gives a pretty good indication for an overall feeling of scale when using simple primitives.

    After seeing this, we are considering to adjust the autotile feature of the worldbuilder to support simpler autotiles compared to the pretty complex path autotile that requires a minimum of 16 up to 48 unique tiles to work well while the simpler version works with 4 or 5.

    Also we noticed that the setup of a tileset is still a bit too complex and we will work on a quicker, probably automated version next.

    Screenshot


    We are really happy and excited to be working on new art and the worldbuilder.

    Have a wonderful day.
     
  4. Golden-Skull-Studios

    Golden-Skull-Studios

    Joined:
    Jan 18, 2015
    Posts:
    39
    Update on the Worldbuilder
    We have made several art tests with different tile divisions and modeling approaches as you may have seen in our last post. Through those tests we have realized that we will probably need a precision mode as part of the worldbuilder that lets you paint smaller tiles in a sub-grid within the world. That way users will have full control over the visual scale and fidelity of the worlds without the necessity for overly complex tilesets.

    Of course we will support complex tilesets aswell with complex autotiles, but we prefer simple solutions for most cases and try to come up with clever solutions.

    Fill Tool v0.2
    Development wise, we have fixed the buggy fill tool. It works without bugs now. The only issue we run into is the update frequency within the Unity Editor. There is no constant frame by frame update, so we try to solve that issue to make the tool work faster without freezing the editor while it is calculating but also without causing massive delays.



    Thoughts on a percision mode
    In addition to that, we have continued with some art asset tests and found that to avoid forcing huge tilesets on the users, we will introduce a precision mode that let's you go into a tile and paint parts of a tile directly from a list of precision prefabs.
    In our minds, this sounds intuitive and practical, especially when trying to break up the blockiness, but we have to build and test the feature to draw actual conclusions about its usefulness.

    Brush Tool
    Furthermore, we decided to focus on improving the brush tool next to speed up the creation process enormously.
    We plan to have controls to paint on all 3 axes at the same time, possibly add scatter features and an experimental image input. We need to find a way to have a proper preview of the brush and the eraser as well as potential copying of existing tiles and rotating the brush and/or the tiles

    Art Assets
    Along the development of the worldbuilder we will create some art content aswell. Mostly 3d primitives but also textures. We will make test assemblies, play around with props to see where things are going. There is a good chance we will end up with enough content to release a new package for you.

    Testing Availability
    As soon as we are satified with the core, we will release a video, the next step will be a WebGL build with the runtime features and then we will prepare the early access.
    We are very excited and really hope you are aswell.

    Thoughts on development
    At the moment we can only work on the worldbuilder besides our day jobs, which leaves very limited time.
    We try to find at least some time on the weekends to make progress, too, but it is taxing.
    Since I will be looking for a new job or potential commissions at the end of January, I will have at least the February to dedicate more time to GSS, which is also mainly thanks to the sale in December, but I need to figure out what to do from March onwards. If our revenue starts increasing or there are some commission opportunities popping up, I might continue development, otherwise I need to go back to a fulltime job with only limited resources left for GSS.
    It is a tricky situation, but I am sure there is a way. My heart is fully attached to GSS and it would be a pity not being able to dive into it fully. The support and love from all of you guys really motives me and the others currently involved in GSS.
    We will work hard to make it count!

    Stay creative, stay productive,

    your GSS Team
     
    Last edited: Jan 8, 2017
  5. Golden-Skull-Studios

    Golden-Skull-Studios

    Joined:
    Jan 18, 2015
    Posts:
    39
    We are making some progress.
    We are currently evaluating the progress of the worldbuilder and ran into some things that we want to fix soon.
    There are still a lot of issues to tackle, but we are getting there.

     
    Poolay likes this.