Moar Awesome Character Movement - Jimmy

I've been working on character movement logic, to ensure it feels smooth and pleasant in all situations. You're going to be using the character controller pretty much every single second while you're playing Logic World, so it's important that the movement logic is really solid.

[previewyoutube=44WGWAgXQ48;full][/previewyoutube]


Terrain Tech - Jimmy

As I spoke about last week, one of my main tasks for this month is to create awesome environments for you to build circuits in. It's time to put the 'world' in Logic World.

To that end, I've been working on environment tech and tooling this week. I've got a bunch of really cool stuff in the pipeline, but today I want to show you two particular shader features for rendering ground textures.

[h2]Stochastic Texturing[/h2]

Human brains are finely tuned for pattern recognition. So when a game uses a repeating texture, we can easily spot the repetition. We see the grid lines, and it looks "fake".



There are a number of ways to solve this problem, and I did research into many of them this week. The solution I've chosen is procedural stochastic texturing, a technique invented by Eric Heitz and Fabrice Neyret in 2018. Stochastic texturing is fast, it looks amazing, and it's incredibly easy to set up.



The algorithm works by taking random hexagonal samples of the tiled texture, rotating them randomly, then laying the samples out on a hexagonal grid and blending them together. This, in my opinion, is absolutely bloody genius. There's a great visualization of how it works on page 5 of the research paper.

Logic World will use a particular implementation of stochastic texturing developed by Jason Booth for his Microsplat tool. This implementation uses texture heightmaps to blend the samples, to ensure the blends are super high quality with no visible seams.

[h2]Triplanar Mapping[/h2]

A common issue with terrain in video games is that the textures are typically projected onto the terrain from above. This results in very ugly and gross stretching of the textures on steep slopes.



A common and effective solution to this problem is triplanar mapping. This technique uses three projections of the texture, one for each plane in 3D space. The projection used for a particular point on the terrain is determined by the normal to the surface there. At the borders between projections, they are blended together.



I want to build lots of lovely cliffs and mountains. With triplanar mapping, they are sure to look their best


More mice - Felipe

This week I haven't had much time to dedicate to Logic World since I'm preparing for more final exams, but regardless I have made progress on mice, my new microservice library. More specifically, I've been working on migrating all our existing services to this library, which is just tedious work since I have to go one by one.


Bugs Fixed This Week

• Fixed player vertical flying speed not changing proportionally with player scale
  
• Fixed "Player Gravity Scale" slider being adjusted in increments of 1.0 instead of 0.1