The current milestone focuses on adding sounds, but I’ve taken a detour to do something else for the time being: starting to recreate the actual location. It’s time to find out if the gameplay works in the location it is meant to take place in.
I’ve spent the last couple of days working on two things: first, exporting many high quality assets from the Unreal Engine marketplace to the Godot engine. I’ve got hundreds of assets in total – construction area props, vehicles, bushes, trees, furniture and much more. For the time being only a couple dozen have made the transition to Godot. The process is easy in a mechanical sense, but it’s time consuming.
Second, I started to recreate the area around the hotel in Via Centrale, so we can transition slowly but surely from the boxy testing area to the real location. Here are a couple of pictures of what the game currently looks like.
The terrain backdrop is real geometry, not just a fake skybox image. I’ve created it roughly a year ago with the free Blender GIS addon. This addon allows you to grab satellite data from Google and other providers from inside Blender. You then add the height data as well, and the addon will automagically displace your terrain to the correct height. There are two animated images on the website I’ve linked that show this in action if you are interested.
How to get all the shapes and sizes right
The key to doing this is a drone and photogrammetry software. We first took a couple of pictures from the site using a drone. The pictures contain metadata like the camera’s metrics and the GPS coordinates for every shot. We then use Agisoft Metashape to generate a 3D object from these pictures. The blue rectangles you can see on the next images were points at which the drone took a picture.
You end up with a highly detailed 3D object. It looks fine on first glance, but it’s not ready to be used for a game in this state.
Looks fine, right? Well, the entire scene has 3,3 million triangles. And they are messy.
And while the house looks quite nice from afar, looking at it from below at close distance makes the problems painfully obvious.
Luckily though the dimensions are all correct, and the scene is aligned to the north and not some random point. This is possible because Metashape can recreate the real dimensions from the GPS data.
The next step is to recreate the building from scratch with new, clean geometry. The rough building is used as a reference and guide. It’s like painting by numbers, but in 3D.
There are obviously a lot of details still missing. These will be added over time.