Tools of Development: Procedural Generation
Finding ways to ease the burden of creating new worlds, which is often a hard and time-consuming process, is one of our primary goals at all stages of development in Victoria VR. Procedural generation tools can be a good servant but a bad master. It is crucial that everything is set up perfectly right from the beginning, and that is no easy task. It involves several advanced techniques to ensure that the terrains and landscapes we generate look both natural and detailed.
So, what exactly is procedural generation? It has proven to be a game changer in landscape creation, giving developers unprecedented flexibility and efficiency in creating large and realistic virtual worlds. We only use procedural generation for smaller parts of the world that we then modify to our liking, but some games have procedural generation algorithms that can create entire worlds with forests, mountains, rivers, or even entire galaxies.
The combination of Unreal Engine and Houdini has proven to be the best for the needs of Victoria VR. Houdini’s Heightfield nodes provide a robust foundation for terrain generation, allowing the creation of large and detailed terrains. Working with Houdini’s node system allows us to add hills, valleys, and ridges to the terrain. To extend the procedural capabilities of Houdini, we apply PDG, which stands for Procedural Dependency Graph. It allows for scalable and automated workflows, essential for generating multiple variations of the landscape. The use of nodes enables us to control specific parameters. The final and crucial step is to apply erosion. Houdini provides sophisticated erosion tools that can simulate natural processes such as water flow or sediment transport. This helps make the terrain look even more realistic by controlling parameters like sediment capacity and the amount of rainfall.
In the future, when developing procedural landscapes, we plan to use the latest PCG technologies from Unreal Engine along with the variability and proceduralism of Houdini tools. There is a long list of problems to solve in the future, but the main one at the moment is optimizing the game for VR and tweaking the multi-layered textures on the generated landscapes. We will address these issues with highly configured materials in Unreal Engine. Some of the settings for these materials will be created in Houdini and transferred to Unreal Engine.
These tools allow us to create believable and realistic landscapes for our project, saving us a huge amount of time that we can spend on other stages of development. It may sound like the tools do the hard work, but setting them up correctly and fine-tuning the details to perfectly match the vision of Victoria VR’s art direction is the real work, and our developers and technical departments have outdone themselves!
About Victoria VR — www.victoriavr.com
Victoria VR is a revolutionary Blockchain-based Virtual Reality Metaverse. Powered by Unreal Engine and featuring realistic, highly detailed graphics, it combines a massively-multiplayer-online role-playing game (MMORPG) with a unique Social Experience Playground.
Like never before, players will be immersed in a virtual reality world where they get to live their digital life. Whether you want to Play games, Develop your digital real estate (VR Land), Own a business, Work up or Get some entertainment, your imagination is the only limitation.
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