Since the last posting here on my blog I got a big share of the outstanding Todos for the coming demo done (around 50% of the points on the list), so work is still going at my projected speed and the game is looking and feeling better and better each day.
And as I already hinted at in my last posting one of the things I did was the customization of the regional 3D view. Before this all regions looked the same no matter where they were located or how much they were populated. And since I didn’t like this myself the game will now display each region differently depending on where it’s located, how much it’s populated and also shows some environmental effects. Right now there are seven different terrains (depending on where the region is located), three differently popualted backgrounds (from low denstiy with small houses up to high density with lots of skyscrapers) and also three different types of roads. The background and roads will change depending on populationcount of the region and there is also moving water for regions that have a coast. Other than that I also have an environmental effect for high pollution so that at a certain point you’ll begin to see a waving fog-layer that gets thicker with higher pollution and high pollution will also cause the water to get dirty. So all-in-all this should be sufficent variety to make the regions look different and more interesting, though I’ll may add some more environmental effects later on.
To see what I was talking about here are four screens of different regions, and for the second one you can already see the fog-layer (click on each for a bigger view) :
