Hey crew. I thought you might like to take a peek at a project in beta: “Forest.” It’s a one button god-game-style simulation, intended as a meditation on life at a forest’s timescale.
This is beta 7 of a project I started in the spring to fill out my Masters applications. (Apparently it worked; I start at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen this fall!)
The trees are still static sprites, so they don’t respond to lighting. I envision a system of low-detail 3d trees in the foreground, which are lazily rendered to a spritemap to fill out the background.
The controls likewise need work, especially after watching a touchscreen-native (20 year old) play with it. It’s not an FPS, and the random drifting is fundamental to the experience, but swipe gestures need to be taken more into account.
Lastly, for drawing the landscape diffuse map, DynamicTexture is slow. (Really, Canvas is slow, when many drawing states have to be used.) I’m minimizing and batching DynamicTexture updates as much as possible, but it’ll all need to be replaced with something more radical.