Outdoor maps and heightmaps

Note: This article was written on 2025-01-03, as a summary of the events happening on Discord back during this development log

As part of the outdoors area, I wanted to have the ability to implement terrain with different heights, also known as heightmaps.

For this part, I mostly followed the excellent "3D world generation" series by SimonDev. I only needed a simple version for now, adapted by using a pre-generated heightmap instead of pure Perlin noise all of the time (as proposed in the video series).

And so, by March 16th, I had the ability to move on heightmap-based terrain

I ended up testing things out with randomly generated terrain and structures

Over the next few days, I finalized the randomly generated terrains, and started spawning patrolling NPCs and merchants at random to observe their interactions. This did lead to a funny interaction while working on AI because the AI capture code only targeted an area and not a NPC.