This week at Realm
Welcome back to our weekly DevLogs! Before we launch into the technical stuff, let’s take a look at what happened this week in the Realm Metaverse.
We are ramping up our bug-catching efforts by adding new Alpha members every Tuesday — if you want to help us bug-test the app before Beta, sign up to be an Alpha tester now! On Tuesday we had our usual Weekly Founders AMA, and if you missed out on it live you can listen here. If you haven’t gotten enough Realm content yet, then you can also check out this clip from Joe Parys’ latest video! We then published the latest Advisor Series article about our advisor (and ex-head of blockchain at Samsung) David Ham. Finally, yesterday we hosted another Realm Quiz on Discord where six lucky winners walked away with $50 of $REALM each! We host a quiz every week, so make sure you tune in for your chance to win some tokens.
Now on to the dev log…
Get them coins!
We know you love our driving updates, and we are always developing the mechanics to make the experience more authentic! This week we have enhanced our driving with item collection and the ability to drive on surfaces at all angles. These updates will allow you to explore, earn, and overtake your opponents in new and creative ways. Check out the video below and let us know what other driving updates you would like to see on Twitter!
The Seeds of Life
Our art department has been pondering the role of seeds as the building blocks of life within the Realm metaverse. Given our focus on creating a positive social and environmental impact, we really want these genetic blueprints to stand out. Seeds will be an integral part of the process of planting trees in order to feed your Realmie — and every time you plant a tree in the game, a tree will be planted in real life as well. So far we’ve created the concepts for three kinds of seeds — Grenadine the Fire seed, Cerulean the Water seed, and Heliotrope the Wind seed. Each one is uniquely designed to represent its elemental qualities, and each district of the metropolis has its own distinct types of organic plants and trees that flourish from these magical seeds. This is just the beginning of the beautiful flora you will encounter in Realm!
Minimal Surfaces
We have been working on an entirely new class of 3D modules based on parametric geometries called “minimal surfaces”.
Complex, curved, three-dimensional objects look fantastic and are great for players to explore. However, they can be difficult to split into smaller repeatable modules, and they also come at the cost of having a vastly higher vertex count. These complex objects might look good, but they can be inefficient and slow down gameplay. In order to solve these issues we looked into “minimal surfaces”, which are formed by rotating and re-combining identical smaller surfaces around the xyz-axes.
Using particle systems in Blender to assemble the larger geometries allows us to export them to Godot as `MultiMeshes`, which is advantageous because the actual mesh data loaded onto the GPU is going to be significantly smaller than recombining copies of normal `MeshInstances`. The result will put less stress on your mobile phone and lead to faster loading, which will create greater stability within the app and empower a level of creativity that would not be otherwise possible.
This technique is usually used to randomly scatter vegetation or rocks across large areas; however, with Blender’s particle system we can accurately control the location and rotation of each MultiMesh instance. This allows us to repeat the source module any amount of times with a single draw-call, so we can build structures that look complex but are actually quite simple.
We will be incorporating these new modules into the builder so that everybody can use them. Also stay tuned for a major update to one of our existing realms where parametric multi-meshes will play a major role. . .
We hope you enjoyed this week’s dev log!
Until next week,
Realm
About Realm
Realm is a mobile-first, play-to-earn, social impact driven Metaverse that allows gamers, players and artists to create their own personalized NFT microverse. Creators can bring unique music, art, and games into their realms. Whole living worlds can be minted as an ERC-1155 NFT and traded on the OpenSea Marketplace. Additionally, players can discover, trade, collect and view NFTs in the environments and experiences their creators imagined.
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