And here I am, fighting again. It seems that I have many issues to master before I can begin to work. This is always unappealing to most, but for me, it’s simply more foes to vanquish. The math is simple, fight-lose-fight-lose-fight-lose-fight-win. If you don’t look at life in this way, you will end up ‘done’. It is said that Bruce Lee, the greatest martial artist of all time, once said: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” In like manner, no matter the failures, I’ll keep doing until I’m GUD.
I’ve always had my eyes on a wonderful program called World Creator which continues to mature proudly and it was my first choice before the LANDMASS feature on Unreal Engine 5. But as I said earlier, UE5 will make this work, but maybe not as soon as I need it. When you miss your flight, sometimes you just need an earlier flight than your carrier can provide. I am not knocking UE5, but their process is still too complex to spend much time with when you have the task I have to accomplish.
World Creator does one thing that is INSANE, and falls right into my needs like coffee into a morning mouth. It can use a wide variety of topographical datasets, otherwise known as a type of map. There are scores of map types and what Unreal Engine likes to use when trying to use real-world data, or a place on the planet that actually exists, is something called a ‘height-map’. It’s actually nothing more than a satellite photo of the area you want to replicate in your game, but in grayscale, like an x-ray.
This is Saba Island, which is cannon in the story of Purgatorio. Unreal Engine sees a height-map and says the brighter the area, the higher the elevation, and the darker the area, the closest it is to sea level. Some height-maps are pretty good and can create a base map like the one that I showed you in the August 21st of this year’s post. But I’m having some difficulty in increasing the size of the island. It’s either that or break up the island into smaller pieces called ‘Levels’. That’s an entirely different story and details that raise their own issues. It can be done, and it might even be smarter to break this beast up, but Unreal 5 promises to tame the monster, and therefore nullifying a score of problems associated with levels.
World Creator is a ‘helper’ of sorts for Unreal Engine. It can use nearly any type of topographical data to hand to Unreal for use. With the Integrated Real-World Map Browser you can use any type of map data. One caveat, World Creator 3 uses a partner program called Maptiler which collects the real time data in all of its various kinds, such as basic maps, OpenStreetMaps, outdoor maps, pastel maps, Satellite Hybrids, street maps Toner maps Topological maps, the lists are endless. But why is this important to me?
It’s hard to say. I don’t think that Unreal Engine can handle EVERY map that world creator can throw at it, however I’m counting on not ALL, but at least ONE. It would take a load off if I can make this work. I also own height-maps of my own, and maybe I should resort to this first when I get World Creator.
Still, that remains to be seen.