#caverndev — Public Fediverse posts

Not me staying up late figuring out how to fake KI coordinates so that a flat game world appears to have a realistic radius by decreasing the elevation coordinate value the farther one got from the Zero point as though one were walking around on a sphere. Nope. Definitely not me. #Myst #Uru #CavernDev

More #caverndev progress! Pretty much all of the buildings are in place for the harbor district, so now it's time to Get Serious and start working on stairs and plazas. I've also included the front elevations for the Common Library and the Temple of Yahvo for an added sense of place and scale. Once the walkable surfaces are in place, I'll be shrinking up the bottoms of the buildings so they don't all start at 0 elevation. It's just so much easier to draw them in like this.

I also worked out the stair increments for the switchback that goes up the cliff face, as marked out in the second image, so that'll probably be what I end up focusing on for the rest of the ding-dang week.

Terrain will come in last, honestly. It'll just be a lot easier to build it up with the buildings already there. #myst #dni

City Proper progress report: buildings are coming along, but I've put off doing the switchback stairs up the cliff to the upper rim for now because that is going to be SO MUCH WORK to calculate out. #myst #dni #caverndev

I've had people accuse me in the past of putting K'veer in the “wrong" place within the D'ni Cavern on the map I made for #Unwritten. Their evidence is, essentially, the view of Ae'gura from the ballroom window in Uru. However, Uru's K'veer scene has the island *directly* on the line of the Great Zero, which is *definitely* wrong. Turns out it just uses the same backdrop mesh as the neighborhoods. This image from the old DRC website, which is based on the much older map of the Cavern from the Book of Ti'ana, is the only *released* piece of material that has an estimated location for it, and it's on the east side of the lake there.

Without revealing sources, some stuff we got from Cyan for the Lore Project depicted K'veer *behind* Ae’gura, which is also a weird take.

Basically, I picked an island that seemed to be in the generally correct location based on the DRC map and rolled with it. I've been through every bit of lore surrounding the place, and that's about as good as it gets. #caverndev

Does choosing to make all of my stair measurements in 25ths of a span mean everything is more complicated to build? Yes.

Do I get a subtle joy out of making sure my scene is using D'ni units wherever possible? Also yes. I'm also considering using 3/5ths of a span (9.34ft) and 4/5ths of a span (12.64ft) as standard ceiling heights for interior spaces.

(Side note: Uru's game engine treats spans as being 16 feet long. They're actually 15.8 feet. I'm sure this won't cause problems ever.) #caverndev

It Begins. Again. #myst #dni #caverndev

The Great Zero scene from Uru is actually larger than I expected it to be, but it does still fit up at the top of the island at the correct scale with the dimensions I've used.

Bevin also seems to fit pretty well with where its KI coordinates say it should be, provided the cavern ceiling slopes down to meet it.

Kirel is... a minor problem. The entire scene in Uru is just “Bevin but flipped on the X axis”, *including* the rest of the cavern backdrop. The *elevation* and *distance* differences relative to Bevin seem reasonably accurate, but its angular placement within the cavern is Very Wrong. Based on the scene, it’s to the right of the Zero line (with a small angular offset value), but according to its KI coordinates in-game, it’s to the left of it (with a very large angular offset). #myst #dni #caverndev

Having lost the original Unity project in a hard drive failure, I'm working on rebuilding the D'ni cavern. Again. So, I figured I'd use this thread to talk about what I've done and what I've uncovered.

As a base, I'm using the composite cavern map I made for Unwritten which tries to merge the Book of Ti'ana map with the much more detailed Great Zero courtyard map. I'm also using the map of Ae'gura that I made for Unwritten, with dimensions taken from both the old Uru development maps I based it on, as well as the estimation from Book of Ti'ana that Ae'gura is over a mile tall.

#myst #dni #caverndev