I’ve been trying to establish a good solid foundation for the main biome in Parabellum, which is based on kind of moorlands found in England and Scotland. As the past few posts have been very word heavy, this one will be picture heavy instead!
I put some simple audio against a short video of the biome in its current state, to mock up how the ambience should be:
The biome makes use of several ground textures, placed procedurally based on rules such as terrain slope and height. It allows for quick, precise editing and iteration, freeing me from having to paint it all by hand each time I want to redesign an area.
Same goes for grass, and ground cover. This is an early shot to try and capture mood, using a little bit of good old fog.
I’ve put a few trees together to try and populate it out, though the rendering on them is still a bit iffy, I want to go back and make this look much better.
Today I made a few large rocks to use as cover for vehicles in this wide open areas:
Here’s a shot with them present:
I think I’m going to strip back a lot of the tree cover, and have a much sparser biome for this first environment. I like the second image below the video above, the open terrain more closely resembles the environment I’m trying to imitate, and will be better suited for tank combat.
It’ll also be better performance wise, too. I think I’ve gone too heavy on quantity as I’ve developed this, and the lighting/post processing has become too heavy and off target. I’ll make adjustments to it while in this early stage, hopefully bringing it back in line with the original vision of the ‘moors.
I’m going to take a brief break from this now to focus on bringing new GUI in, and then on to a vehicle for each side. I don’t want to get locked into the environment 100% while the vehicle is still a placeholder leftover model.
Once the GUI has had a pass, and there’s a new vehicle for each side, I’ll come back to polish this, make it look much nicer, and compose it into the first map.
Parabellum 