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[pspeed]

Just wanted to say that the project and I are still alive.

For the past few weeks, I've been poking and tweaking generated caves.  It's one of those things that's tricky to get right but that really has to be done right the first time or there are follow on consequences.  The fortunate thing is that the two-step process of cave generation is exactly the same infrastructure needed for random dungeon and town generation... their data structures are just different.

It seems like I'm down to the "parameter tweaking" phase.  There are some really kick butt caves and gorges generated and some really mediocre caves generated.  I'm trying to make less stupid caves and more cool ones.  For example, right now sometimes there are a lot of caves that end up in open air and so we never see them.  Some of that is good because when the particular cave system dips below ground it makes for some interesting openings... but it happens far too often.

Another reason it has been slow going is because I find some cave systems that I really like and then I'm hesitant to change the parameters and lose those caves.  I end up having to take a break and come back with fresh eyes and be willing to trash all existing caves for the cool caves yet to be.

Anyway, current cave systems are fully functional with respect to water... so caves that start in the water will contain water until rising above sea level, etc... was an interesting algorithm to get working without flowing water but that's all done and working now as far as my testing shows.

Hopefully you've seen some of the pictures on facebook.  Hopefully this will all be set to release by Monday.  Really hopefully, I can finish caves tonight and get to work on some other things before Monday.

[ayoriceball]

Good work so far. Is it possible we could edit the "parameters"?

[FutureB]

yay, but on ur server im guesing the caves will only generate in areas where people havnt been. Is this true or am i mistaken

[pspeed]

yay, but on ur server im guesing the caves will only generate in areas where people havnt been. Is this true or am i mistaken

That's true.  I may clean out unedited tiles like I did for the trees... though it would leave partial caves sometimes.

[pspeed]

Good work so far. Is it possible we could edit the "parameters"?

Not these particular parameters.  It's the way the code works.

However, the system is setup so that a modder could make manual caves, too.  It's a two step process.  One step randomly generates the basic cave description and then the second step carves them out of the terrain with some small randomization.  A future version (probably won't have time to get it into this one) will allow modders to place their own cave descriptions in a particular place.  These descriptors will likely be simple groovy scripts which does also leave the possibility of calling into the normal generator with a little more control... so you could seed specific caves in a specific location but let the rest of the cave system self-generate or something.

[Bigworsh]

After looking at the pictures I have to say that the sunlight looked pretty nice. It´s adding the whole cave a good atmosphere.

I think especially when you are trying to get out of a big cave, that seeing the sunlight, while in the cave you will get a really cool feeling that you finally found the exit.
So I'm hoping that there will be times where you really want to get out of there, maybe you will be persued by some creatures because you killed one of them and you know that your only chance to survive would be getting out of the cave, because they are too many. And then you are seeing the sunlight and understand that you only have to survive a little longer, but at the same time understand that even if you see the sunlight the way still is long enough that you could get killed and your whole efford would be in vain. At least something like that I am imagining.

Sorry, if it's a bit offtopic, I simply wanted to say that I really liked the picture with the sunlight, while you are standing far away from the exit.
I'm really excited to see how the caves will look at the end. Keep up the good work and again an off-topic question. When will objects get their physics, at least that you can't run through them?

[pspeed]

Thanks.  Yeah, I think there will be lots of cases where you'll be running through the caves.  When I'm swimming in the underwater caves, for some reason I instinctively hold my breath.  I can imagine a case where you are scrambling for the surface.

Objects will get their physics soon.  Not this release but probably the next they will at least have object->world and player->object collisions enabled... optionally.  For a while, players will be able to set objects as static, mobile, and collidable independently.  By default (for a while) they will still be floating holograms.  "Static" will basically make them collidable fixtures of the world... players won't be able to walk through them and they won't move if a player bumps them.  "Mobile" means they are collidable and also behave like physical objects against the world.

Object->Object collisions will come later.  In the mean time, the above will hopefully be enough let me get ships working.