Dear Islanders,
It has been a while since our last development update. We have been very busy filling the island with vegetation. For the most part, the work on placing trees and grass is complete. What remains is adding void masks to certain grass types, mainly in the European and mountain biomes. Right now the grass there looks a bit like "everything was thrown into a pile", but we have already postponed this post for too long, so we decided to show you how it looks at the moment.
Most of our time was spent creating a smart vegetation remover, a vegetation manager, and writing custom shaders. Since we use vegetation from different asset packs, we needed everything to sway in the wind in a more or less uniform way, so we had to develop new shaders. A lot of time also went into building the smart remover and manager to solve issues like trees spawning inside each other or too close together. We also invested significant time into creating spawn masks, so that each vegetation type appears only in its designated biome.
Once we finish polishing the grass, we will move on to spawning objects such as rocks, driftwood, shells, and more.
Thank you all for your support and interest in our project. https://www.indiedb.com/games/strange-island/news/strange-island-devlog-5