Platform Masters development (August 20, 2014) - major progress and trees

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• published: 23 Jun 2016
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Published on Aug 20, 2014 Welcome to the organic industrial center of photosynthesis! That's, in case you're wondering, the silly name I call a forest. A tree by itself is a photosynthesis factory as, in a sense, it produces sugars from carbon dioxide and sunlight, expelling oxygen. It's like a factory, in a sense. A factory is part of an industrial area so, since trees are organic factories, it makes great sense to call a forest an organic industrial center of photosynthesis. I first show you Jeremy's House which has 2 changes. The inclusion of trees is the first and most visible change. The weeping willow, sassafras (I'm unsure how to pronounce it), and a species I don't know what it is but I refer to it as the "wide deciduous". The other change is with the far ground decals - they now use a 32 Kbl repeat width and you can clearly see Yurisin in the distant background, along with the usual farm fields and the like. I reused a lot of what I had before and updating it with the new forest textures I spent several days generating. I then show Ronnis. This only includes the usual trees but I also cover an update I made to the ground decal system. This is better explained later. Ronnisa Plains follows, showing the trees there which includes a new type of tree, the tallest used in the entire game - the eastern cottonwood. This tree stands 896 CU (131.4 feet or 40.055 meters) tall. I haven't updated the rain yet but I have the Keveran River updated so that it varies. It's still rather wide but that's mostly because it's flooded. If you look very carefully, you can see picnic tables in the river water itself due to this flooding. The real beauty in the bunch is Keveran Forest which probably could be renamed to Keveran Jungle given the atmosphere it has. Just look at screenshot 59 or videos from 2009 to 2010 and note how Keveran Forest was then. This is miles ahead of that, to the point it's one of my greatest masterpieces. There are a few details I would like to add in, but I'm too close to the 96 MB limit that I may have to cancel that. With plenty of forest textures made, I updated the ground decals in the Sentus Mountains to include the new forest texture, really bringing out the detail in those settings. The rest area in the Sentus Mountains is a great ares for seeing the forests. Maglev Train has the spruce trees clearly visible. These trees need a redo as the trunks are way too wide. Right now, I'm only using placeholders for these trees as I need to make updates to my layer generation code to allow for this feature. Still, the feel provided with this is really something and the detail they have is amazing. Mount Sentusia's changes are primarily with optimizing the ground decals. The 5 closest lava islands, for example, saw a rather shocking 90% reduction in memory usage. After all, why draw 15,500 out of about 16,000 pixels of absolutely nothing but pure transparency? The optimization cuts out this transparency while still allowing the ground decals to draw properly. Only the space spaces aren't drawing properly any more due to the stacking from exceeding 16,384 pixels in width. I need to add in a rarely-used feature to account for that. Musan Taiga, except for the rare quaking aspen, turned out to be pretty much what I was expecting it to be, except that I'd like to add in some details in the foreground area. The world still primarily uses placeholders though. I've also made changes to Barugan Islands, adding in a breathtaking view, and also added the trees intended for Musan Swamp. You won't get to see those though until PM is released plus some extra time.