Improved Furnishing

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Recent work on Free Company has been focusing on improving the look of the randomly generated rooms by subtly shaping the way the objects are laid out to conform to more human norms of laying out rooms. For example shelves in the game are now no longer empty instead they are filled up with appropriate small objects . The objects as redetermined by the procedural generator-wide tagging system. Objects have tags; levels, monsters and rooms have tags; the generator attempts to assign them to each other using probabilities based on how closely the tags of each align. The way the objects are placed on the shelves is determined by three different algorithmic approaches that attempt to mimic general human behaviour as regards shelves: filling up from the left hand side, from the right hand side and alternately from the left and right hand sides. The quantity of objects on each shelf is determined by a normal distribution linked roughly to the dimensions of the shelf to ensure that the average shelf is about 90% full .

That’s one example, other new strategies have been employed to shape the placement of the shelves themselves and other objects to create the hopefully more believably storeroom like rooms you see in the screen shots on this page. To support these new furnishing algorithms I’ve also been making a whole pile of new objects, almost doubling the number of them in the past week. Some of these can also be seen  in these two shots.

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The basic warehouse layout and furnishing algorithms are probably done about as far as I am going to take them for the first release all the rooms now look passable and I expect I can reuse the same algorithms for a few other environment variants like the crypt and a new library layout once I create a few more objects to support them. I still have plenty more ideas for algorithmic level generation though and I’d love to revisit this area to try and  make even more believable and varied layouts in the future.

The other new things I’ve done  recently are a few minor cosmetic buffs. From feedback to my last post (thanks Stian!) I’ve switched out the general game font for a more serif ridden fantasy one, I’ve fiddled with a few of the most frequently seen textures to try and make them a little less bland (still a work in progress) and I’ve implemented a more flexible system for testing out lighting changes quickly in game (hit a key to rebuild the lights from the theme data .xml files). The last thing (which just went in today) has allowed me to fiddle with small lighting changes and see the result in a couple of seconds rather than the many minutes it was taking before, so I updated a few of my lighting themes with some tweaks too.

Anyway, as usual let me know what you think about the Storerooms or anything else in the post in the comments below.