Will Hain · Engine Programmer 3, Planet Tech

Well, rivers is a funny one. So back to that interview with Marco, when I'm sitting there looking at a picture of New Babbage on the screen and he's saying, how do we solve this problem? How do we solve that problem? And then he says, can I have a look at your dissertation? So I bring it up on my laptop and I've got rivers. I mean, they're just trenches at this point. And I say to Marco, have you got rivers? And he says, we haven't got rivers. So about five, six months into working at CIG, Marco asked me to start working on a terrain modification system. You remember we did the first ISC about that, my first, not yours, because we had no way of modifying the terrain currently. It was fixed because of all the shared data and nothing being local, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I started working on a solution to that. And then I said to Marco, this is going really well. I could use this to make rivers. Do you mind if I do? And he said, no, that sounds cool. So I did. It was really nice to have that freedom, and obviously I couldn't put that much time into it to start with because it was kind of like a side project. I remember the first version of it, we deformed the terrain and then raised the ocean to fill the gap, and it was a real gimmick. It looked really bad. The waves were going the wrong way. And it was the same mesh, so we had no control over it or anything really. But it just about worked. And anyway, he showed CR and we managed to get some time scheduled for it. And that's how I started working on rivers. It was really cool to go from saying I want to work on this to it being a feature. And I remember it coming up on the roadmap for the first time and being really excited. I worked on something that's on the roadmap, and being able to tell people about it. It was cool. I really like the rivers. I still need to do more on them. They're still my baby. No one else takes the rivers.