Shroud of the Avatar: Rivers!

Portalarium programmer Loren Hoffman has posted a new “developer update” entry to the Shroud of the Avatar website, in which he explains his work on rivers, and the systems that are used to generate and add them to the game’s overland map.

It gets a bit technical:

The first phase of adding rivers was getting the data graphed for where rivers flow. In our map system rivers follow the edges of tiles as opposed to roads which move through the middle. As you can see by the coloring we have two different river systems that empty out into the bay to the south. The graph was traversed from the ocean inwards to compute how far each segment is from the ocean and we darken them to represent this distance.

Okay, it gets very technical:

Now that the graphs are ready the next step was to create a system where the nodes of the river are slightly more smoothed out. I knew that eventually I would need to use some kind of spline to create the organic shape of the river so I needed to get a base set of control points to work with. At this stage you can see the control points splitting at branches and that they follow a smoothed path as opposed to the jagged structure of the hexes.

But he has included a number of screenshots in the entry, illustrating the progress and changes made at each step of the development process. It’s an interesting glimpse behind the curtain, and hopefully illustrative of the care and detail that Portalarium will pour into every system utilized in the Shroud of the Avatar games.

And, of course, we’ve added the images Hoffman has provided to our screenshots gallery.