MSH DevLog 1 (6/8/16)

Honestly I haven’t worked on this project since before I even started thinking about HMHY but I still am passionate about it so, before I forget, I feel obligated to record the way it evolved into what it lay dormant as now…  Keyword there is ‘dormant’.

It started with me tinkering with real world height maps, trying to find a way to change topographic maps to a usable grayscale height map but that is not a simple thing to do. I soon abandoned that and I acquired the height map of the exact location I needed. Mount Saint Helens. Lucky me, now I’m all set, right? Well not quite. I needed a ‘pre 1980 height map’ and a ‘post 1980 height map’. Even luckier me, I found both. BUT. One of them was pretty low res. That’s a problem. I need high res terrain for both. So what do i do? Easy.

The game has two terrains that are made of the same exact real world coordinates at different times in history. The noticeable changes between the two are minimal except for inside the ‘blast radius’ of the volcano. Which is where the game takes place. In the so called “Red Zone”. In order to get the low res terrain to look good enough I basically overlaid the low res and the high res so that the terrain still had the shape of the low res but it also has the finer detail of the high res. It is a little more complicated than what I am describing here but that is the general idea of what I did.

More on this in the future.