Hello! I’m Dan, the world generation engineer here at Hytale. Today I’ll be joined by Amber, one of our designers. We’ll be taking you through our world generator today, through the lenses of engineering and design.
In this post, we want to discuss where we are right now and where we’re going. Currently, we have two world generators in Hytale:
- V1 was developed from 2016 to 2020 and served as a prototype to understand our generation’s needs. It produces playable results in exploration mode, but we eventually ended up hitting barriers when we tried to create more zones and more complex biomes.
- V2 has been in development since 2021 to address barriers we previously faced and enable us to achieve our global design goals. V2 will completely replace V1 once we’re ready, and will be the generator we support going forward.
Hytale will launch with Exploration mode on V1 because it already has many biomes and content ready to go. We’re now in the process of creating Orbis on V2. Once completed, V2 will become the primary world generator, and you will enter the new world of Orbis. V1 will eventually stop generating chunks, but your old V1 worlds will still be accessible.
In the meantime, players will be able to see and experience V2 content that is under construction by visiting fragments of Orbis through Gateways in Exploration mode. Then, once we are ready, we’ll begin testing in a pre-release build for the world of Orbis.
An explorer ventures into the new world of Orbis.
Intentional Design
Flyover showing an erosion effect at the transition between the river and forest biomes.
Hytale’s world was always intended to be curated and procedural. This means designers have significant control over what appears in the world and how, even though it’s procedural. This shaped many of the decisions we made in world-gen V2, including giving designers even greater control than before over how content appears in the world. This would include ways for us to better balance resource distribution, breadcrumbing & signposting meaningful content and much more.
A great example of this in V2 is the pattern scanning system – the idea is that we can configure a pattern that determines where props are placed in the world. Typically, we would search for a floor: an empty block with a solid block below. We can also add additional checks to the pattern search to gather more context from the environment. These patterns are fully defined by the creator, which makes this powerful and opens vast possibilities.
A tree with dark leaves and large roots only spawns above caves. This allows us to mark where caves are for players.
Here we can see that ash trees spawn above caves in the deeproot biome because they are configured to sample for empty blocks beneath the ground when placed. This is a fun detail but it allows designers to create something we call “Heuristics”; this refers to deeper patterns that enhance immersion and give gameplay advantages. In this example, players can learn that deeproot caves, which contain special resources, are found under dark ash trees on the map in the plains region.
There are many, many examples of these patterns across our generator allowing designers to communicate with the player in new immersive ways you might not expect!
A log bridge spawns across a river by searching for two shores.
A yellow mushroom and some sticks spawn on the ground around the base of some cedar trees.
Glowing mushrooms that only appear in sheltered areas.
A meadow of flowers spawns in a dip surrounded by small trees and boulders.
Code Mods
With V2’s APIs, world-gen programmers can implement mods that automatically work with the node editor and plug into other vanilla and modded features. V2’s architecture enables the development of strong capabilities by implementing simple, interconnected components. Players and creators can seamlessly integrate features from different mods and the base game. Modders will be able to tweak, extend, and add functionality to customize existing world-gen, such as Orbis, or create new ones.
Our APIs are also automatically multithreaded and provide full read access to the surrounding world context, simplifying logic and freeing up mod developers to focus on capabilities.
For this blog post, we’re focusing on our goals and overall direction. We’ll go into more detail on the technical details after launch!
Creating Content
Anyone can create content and modify world-gen without knowing how to code, as V2 can be edited directly in our node editor. Creators can get started with just a few tutorials and some time to practice. We believe we’ll see creators discover new techniques and tricks for creating content that even we didn’t think of, further expanding what can be done with worldgen.
With our visual node editor, creators can build advanced procedural content by configuring and linking simple nodes. When editing world-gen, the world live-reloads in-game to reflect the changes made within the editor. This is all to make creating advanced biomes easier and faster, bridging the gap between developers and creators.
A creator has created a basic biome in Emerald Wilds and is editing the terrain.
Creators can control each biome’s terrain shape independently and with high precision. In between biomes, the terrain shape transitions from one to the other, blending features seamlessly. Biomes can also customize their terrain as it approaches the edge to customize biome transitions further.
Adding natural rocky surface to a cliff.
Creators can fully control which materials the terrain is made of by assembling Material Provider nodes. Material providers function as logic nodes with configurable rules and terrain context, such as block depth below ground or the amount of empty space above ground.
Grass material is restricted to not spawn where there is less than 10 blocks of air above.
With props, creators can generate localized content such as points of interest (POIs), vegetation, and decorations with precise control over their placement rules and distribution in the world. Props are distributed on a custom procedural point grid, and at each point, a customizable set of rules determines the best placement. The content generated by props can be sourced from prefabs or more procedurally, depending on the creator’s approach.
Increasing the size of forest patches by editing the tree location mask.
We’ve designed the assets that create the world to allow creators to add and edit terrain, props, biomes, and zones as easily as we do. Each biome is treated as a separate tile, like a jigsaw within a zone puzzle, and each zone is treated as its own tile in the patchwork that makes up the world. This means adding new biomes or content, such as prefabs, should be straightforward as we’re giving you all the tools we use to create whatever you want.
Additionally, every single biome that we use in Orbis will be shared with the community. You’ll be able to use the node editor to view, modify and have fun with all the content we made and mix it with your own creations!
The following is a set of experimental feature pack examples, these do not reflect the content that will exist in Adventure.
A close-up shot of an example terrain pack that explores a more chaotic stacked terrain idea.
A wide shot of an example terrain pack that explores a more chaotic stacked terrain idea.
A complex of underwater caves features bracket coral and a shipwreck.
An example terrain pack that explores an arches terrain theme.
An example terrain pack that explores a floating island theme.
A procedurally generated set of rings in an alien world.
Going Forward
Keep in mind that we are in Early Access, many systems are still under active development, and the asset structure will change frequently as we complete core features over the coming months. We’ll deprecate features being replaced where possible, rather than remove them suddenly, because it’s important to us to support creators in the same way we support our designers.
As part of our push to support creators at every step, we’ll publish first-party tutorials, guides, and documentation to train the community alongside us. These will cover everything from gritty world-generation concepts and specific techniques used by designers to in-depth systems documentation and best practices for performance optimization.
Over the short term, we’ll be focusing on performance improvements, upgrading existing features, and making the asset structure more modular and flexible. In the long run, we’re planning a ton of really cool features such as procedural rivers and paths guiding players and connecting places, procedural architecture for generating dungeons, ruins and buildings, organically growing fauna to increase diversity and coherence, waterfalls, and more. Community feedback and suggestions will directly shape the future of Hytale’s world generator!
And last but not least, our designers will be working to release a content-complete Orbis in the new generator. This means we’ll be hard at work creating new prefabs, biomes, regions and zones with that new car smell for everyone to explore and enjoy – until then, we’ll catch you in the next world generation blog!
In the meantime, enjoy some snapshots of our work in progress biomes aimed at a future adventure release.
Plains focused biomes in Emerald Wilds.
Taiga focused river biomes in Whisperfrost Frontier.
A wide shot of a range of biomes in Whisperfrost Frontier.
A Trunk is generated procedurally using terrain and a positions field.
Large standing stones are procedurally generated using terrain and a positions field in the Whisperfrost Frontier.
A lush Oasis lies hidden in the Howling Sands.
Yellow trees spawning only around rivers in the Howling Sands.
An important note from Simon
As I mentioned publicly a few days ago, this new approach to world generation will redefine the block-game genre. For the first time, artists and game designers can take full ownership of world generation, with complete control over the final result. This is a fundamental shift away from a world shaped almost solely by programmers.
With that in mind, I’m pleased to announce that we’re planning to expand the Hytale team with a new job role that, for the most part, has not existed in block-based games before: World Designer. Following the early access release, we plan to expand our team by hiring more than 15 World Designers. These roles will be filled primarily from the community, as artists and game designers learn and build using the same tools we use internally and choose to apply.
Hytale’s vision is to feel carefully handcrafted while remaining infinitely procedural, with design always serving gameplay first!
We are intentionally expansive, just as we envisioned years ago. Beyond Orbis, we plan to explore alternate worlds, new dimensions, and entirely different spaces. These worlds give us room to introduce new blocks, items, prefabs, zones, regions, biomes, NPCs, quests, stories, and gameplay systems.
Not every concept will ship, but together they represent the direction we’re taking as we continue to expand the game.
The Echoes of Orbis and Orbis are just the beginning of an amazing journey.
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