Victor Didra

New Supporter Update, Lots of Trees and Plants!

With the addition of a bunch of vegetation you could now conceivably lay out a garden for the (Northern Hemisphere) coming Spring!

The flat property will work for a lot of people. Some day you may be able to import your own but sadly that is impossible at the moment. But those with flat land are all set!

Be aware that there's no way to save your work yet, so for now it is still highly limited.

Don't forget that you can set your latitude and longitude from the button with the sun on it. You can put it in manually or click the little globe and pick your spot in the world. Then adjust the date and time to see what your shadows look like throughout the year. Pause time with the button above the gray box (in the sun menu).

Plants need water and the easiest way to get it to them is to put in 1mm in the rain menu and make it rain.

If you've already got trees growing and that makes the water look weird, you can reset the water simulation and the plants will still have had a good drink.

If you'd like access right now, please head over to the Patreon page and Subscribe.

And if you don't, please head over to the same page and Follow. That helps too!

Where does the donation money go?



Unreal Assets, that's where! Since today is the start of a big push for getting a wide variety of plants into the game, it was time to buy a bunch.

In an extremely lucky turn of events the new Nanite and Lumen (meaning beautiful) ready Ultimate Farming and Ultimate Farm Trees packs just went on sale for 50% off!

The inventory system that will be used in the future is also on sale for the lowest price I've seen, so I grabbed that for later. That will be used when buying, crafting, and selling your yield are implemented.

All told it came to a little over 2 months of donations. So thank you to our supporters for sponsoring these! You'll have the crops in by the end of the week I hope!

(And thanks to the Asset creators who sell on the Unreal store. If either of us had the skill to make high quality vegetation like this (we don't) it would probably be months of work to do so. Without you this whole project would be impossible or need funding of hundreds of thousands of dollars (Fluid Flux and Voxel Plugin would cost that in person hours to develop).

So stand by for plants!

I'm working on plants, and hope to have a whole pile of them in toward the end of the week.

Since Spring is coming to many, I'd like people to be able to play around designing a garden.



I had really majorly minorly screwed up how plants were going in, and it was causing all sorts of headaches. So I ripped out some things and went back through it step by step, and now it appears that we can do a major vegetation addition.

I also modified plants so you can plant them right up next to each other in case you want to make your garden really tight. You can also put them on steeper hillsides now.

Setting up time to be most useful for planning is the other goal for this upcoming release. I'd like anyone with a flat space to be able to load up the flat map, put all the plants in and see what they'll look like when matured without waiting too long for them to grow, or the plants blowing past mature into dying (like the corn in the picture).

What probably won't be there yet is saving, so maximum usefulness won't be for a little while longer.

I hope everyone's year is going great! I've been told that the first 19 days were the hardest, so it's all good news from here on out!

Thanks! I'll keep at it until it does!

The water catchment release is now permies.

So as to not spam the forums here is a link back to the main thread.

Real world sun is now integrated! You can manually set your latitude and longitude or use the world map dropdown. Drop in a 30m oak tree, build a little house, and scrub time back and forth to see how shadows will fall across it during any time of the year!



If you have flat property there is a flat map that will let you do a semi-decent mockup. You aren't going to do a full property design yet, but it's enough to save you from some mistakes if you happen to be about to start a real world build. You can check your shadows, visualize your rain quantities and roof runoff, which is all very useful.

Terraforming is still a bit ugly, but it works, so if you have a property with slight topography or want to just put a little rise on the flat one, you could manually do that.

Saving your work isn't in yet though, so be warned. And I don't have the tree losing its leaves due to winter, so take that into consideration with your shadow model.

If you'd like access to this one immediately I invite you to support at the Patreon page. You will also get access to exclusive Discord channels that let you see what's going on behind the scenes.

If you aren't up for paying, you can get the previous update including water and the new character, which is now permies. You can also help out by following without subscribing, which is a new thing on Patreon. So please follow and hit those little heart buttons!

So now it's time to sit back and see where we're at again. Voxel Plugin (for terraforming) is between useful releases for us. It has great new materials (so the ground doesn't looks so blah) but broke the terrain editing. Since it's a moving target I don't want to put any time into soil or erosion simulation, which may suddenly break with the next update.

It may be time to do a content update. Plants, trees, and building prefabs (walls, foundations etc).

Or perhaps integrating farming with the sun. That's going to be a weird one because you can move time backwards, but farming is always going forward. What do you think?

We're going to apply for an Epic Megagrant soon, to get some help on systems my blown up brain can't handle.

Thanks!

Oksana created a character to replace the default Unreal robot.



For a game it may be obvious, but if you're thinking of just using this to map out your land you may be wondering "Why does having a 1st person and 3rd person view even matter?" (That's the Sandbox/Property Design side of the program btw).

It's the difference between being able to walk around on a piece of land, and using a drone to check it out. That lower on the ground perspective gives... perspective. It's hard to understand the topography otherwise.

And that means the default robot had to go.

For the game side, we'll have a lot of characters. I want you to be able to simulate your actual situation, which means putting in NPC's to represent your family or employees, giving them strengths, weaknesses, skills, preferences, and hours per day/week that they get to spend working on property, then running that whole thing through the Hierarchical Task Network Planning AI plugin. And parties, they'll get to have parties. Why do all this if there's no parties? It's about people, right?

Anyway, all that comes after you can fully create a property and simulate it, and print out the resulting maps.

Speaking of those maps, I've got an early version where you can put in your lattitude and longitude and it changes the sun position in the day/night cycle to reflect it.

Ultra Dynamic Sky is doing the heavy lifting, what I'm working on is making it usable. That means once again going down the User Interface rabbit hole.

I'll be dropping a Patreon version with all of that before long. When I do I'll also put out a non-supporter version with the water catchment additions from a previous post.

Please follow and heart on Patreon even if you don't subscribe (that's possible now), and join us on Discord to see more real time info like the To Do list. And there's a spot there you can drop your useful videos if you like!

Thanks!

Swales: The Permaculture Game now has a roof * rain calculator and visualization map. It works in metric and imperial, although the water tanks are in round imperial numbers.

(100,000 gallon, 50,000 gallon, 20,000 gallon, 10,000 gallon, 5,000 gallon, 1,000 gallon and 500 gallon).

The intention is twofold, make it easy to calculate how much rain you could be collecting, and get a visualization of that. I've already demoed it privately with some supporters, and it is interesting how seeing the results in 3D (and the numbers as well) gives them a different perspective of what is going on with their property.

Please have a look. I believe that as this matures it is going to become an invaluable tool for all of us when designing or managing properties.

Major update: Water measurements, roof catchment, and more!

Do you ever wonder how much water is running off of your roof yearly? Or do you know the numbers, but want to see what that means visually?

Then this release should really excite you!

We have a new map that lets you get rainfall results visually as well as in numbers. Put in your roof size and a rainfall amount and direct the runoff toward different size tanks to get a deeper understanding of what those numbers mean.

You can start to do some basic design work. Build a house that matches yours. Dig a bit, build up a bit, set up your irrigation and water catchment. Put some plants in there and watch the water from your roof run over to them and keep them healthy!

New Maps:

   

The rain gauge map mentioned above.

   

A mostly flat map for the many people with very little topography variance on their property (About 40 acres / 16 hectares)

Totally redesigned user interface:

   

   Gone are most of the text boxes. Now there are icons representing most of the functions, in handy pop out toolbars.

   The windows/tools/pop up bugs are gone (we hope, please let us know otherwise)

New Functionality:

   Specify rainfall amounts in all maps (metric or imperial)

   Reset the rain simulation without restarting the program

   Better terrain editing

   Farming! It’s basic, but a start. Only potatoes and tomatoes, and the potato plant doesn’t even finish as the correct species. But it is a start!

   You can place seeds and they will grow.

   Water in the level irrigates the plants.

There is still an infinite amount of work to do but that’s ok. It feels great getting to a point where this is becoming useful.

A big thank you to our supporters. You keep the motivation alive. If you would like to support and gain instant access to this release and exclusive Discord channels, please visit the Patreon page today!

Also, keep an eye on the Water Catchment forum here. We are putting together a demo video and will post it there.

Usefulness!

In the next update you will be able to put in square foot/meter of an area (for instance, your roof), and an amount of rain in mm or inches (for example, your yearly average), and then see how much water that is.

It's easy to go online (or to your head or to your calculator) and get the numbers for how much water is coming off your roof.

It's not so easy to SEE what that actually MEANS in terms of water volume.

Now you can. Watch with glee as you fill water tanks, or even a swimming pool!



I'm hoping to get this out to Patrons this week. Please follow there, even if you don't subscribe. That will help build momentum. And hearts on the posts is always appreciated as well.

And as always I invite you to join our Discord, where I keep a running To Do list and post much more regularly.

Thanks for watching!