Monthly Archives: February 2016

Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 2

by in Game Project Updates, Gemstone Keeper, Procedural Content Generation and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Last time I talked about writing a gemstone generator for Unity, in this part I’ll talk about taking that script and making it work in SFML 2 using C++. What makes this challenging is that Unity is a 3D engine with a Mesh class making it easy for procedural geometry, while SFML is a C++ framework made primarily for 2D games. The most SFML gives you is the sf::Vector3f object, which allows you to store 3D [x,y,z] coordinates, which means the rest of it is up to you. As of writing, this is the approach I went to generate 3D gemstones in Gemstone Keeper.

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Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 1

by in Game Releases, Gemstone Keeper, Procedural Content Generation and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

So two years ago as a student researching for his thesis, I took part in the first procjam. Organised by Michael Cook, this is a games jam that focuses on procedural content, whether that be games, art, text, tools, anything that can make something. Last year I decided to go a bit basic, write some pre-existing noise and maze algorithms for the Haxe Programming Language, which I eventually tweaked and published on Haxelib and Github as MAN-Haxe.

Last year, I decided that for my current project, I was going to do something relevant, and this time use no pre-existing algorithms, this is where the Gemstone Generator comes in. I have images of the meshes below that show the progress from early successful generations to the final most generation test before the UI layout was cleaned up and the demo was uploaded. The generative process is now being used in Gemstone Keeper, albeit with a different rendering process considering I’m turning Unity’s Procedural Meshes into SFML meshes.

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