Topia World Builder - (by Crescent Moon Games)

[JoshCM]

Originally Posted by Candykiller

This is fun, and it looks great on the iPad 3. You can get into quite a nice level of detail with the landscapes. Click here for a full resolution iPad 3 screenshot. http://www.candykiller.com/temp/topia1.jpg

those are really unique mountains!
thanks everyone for the suggestions so far. Glenn and I have been thinking about what to put in the next update, and listening to your feedback.

[JoshCM]

Originally Posted by Turk

Suggestion/question:


What do the symbols mean when the animals interact? I got the "X" means something died, the weird symbol means something was born, but I don't get the Heart. Doesn't seem like anything happens with that. Can we have a legend in the menu describing the symbols, the animals and what they eat, and different landscape types (desert, grass, mountain, etc) and what may grow on them?

An idea for a game mode: start with X resources. Each critter and land deformation costs resources. You gain resources by creatures reproducing. See how large a herd you can manage on a preset world. Occasional predatory incursions can be fought off by spending resources on the Lightning tool (or disintegration button, whatever you wanna call it :P) or deforming land to isolate your herd (but now there is less food to go around, less room to grow, etc). Give a timeline to reach certain goals. Seems like it wouldn't be super hard to implement based off of what's already in game.

that actually sounds similar to one of the original 'game ideas' we were toying around with.

[ninjackid]

I'm just gonna grab this from all these positive impressions!

EDIT: Darn, iOS 5 only. Gotta get around to updating my iOS sometime soon...

[Turk]

Originally Posted by JoshCM

that actually sounds similar to one of the original 'game ideas' we were toying around with.

Cool! Im available Monday- Friday after 5pm and I will work for Baconators and Mountain Dew :P. I don't think adding in game modes would detract from the sandboxishness of the current build. Just leave a sandbox mode as the default game "type".

There is such a huge range of directions you guys can go with what you've built. Really looking forwards to seeing what you come up with!

Another game type:

Flip the tables a bit. Have random preset worlds already populated (kinda like Solitare apps that keep score based on the "puzzle" number) and give the player something like 3 predators they can place on the world. Once placed, time how long it takes for them to devour everything! Poor placement = slow reproduction and longer time to travel between herds. Just a nifty way to watch everything get butchered and get a score for it haha!

[GSJ1977]

Unfortunately this... app... only held my attention for a few minutes, and was then deleted. It's a cool idea but there's just not enough to do at the moment. It's not the lack of objectives that bothers me, it's the lack of tools/abilities/change. I can make a mountain and a beach and a valley. That's it. Ok I can throw in some animals, but they are rather poorly done - they look bad and don't seem to do anything very interesting. More interesting to me would be the ability to fast forward time (a lot) and watch as weather (and maybe other things like volcanoes and even tectonic plate movements) build, move, and erode the landscape. Perhaps that's asking too much, but as it stands there's just not enough here to do/watch.

[k1lljoy_89]

Or you could just have fun making stuff...

I'm gonna try and make earth here in a minute.

[Eoghann]

Nice landscape candykiller! This game makes we want to have an iPad really bad!

Still haven't quite figured out how to make deserts yet. Everything I flatten turns to grass. Everything I raise is a mountain, everything I lower is water. Is there a specific combination?

Thanks!

We need some lava if we dig deep enough.
And horizontal carving. I've been wanting to carve arches and caves on mountainsides from the first time I launched it. :P

[Johnny101]

Originally Posted by k1lljoy_89

Or you could just have fun making stuff...

I'm gonna try and make earth here in a minute.

Exactly, it visually is one of the coolest little apps out there, worth a buck to play God for a minute or two.

[Jordanrracer]

Hi I recently bought this app and I was excited to play it, but when I did, I noticed it was pretty choppy/laggy performance wise and I wasn't sure if it was because I'm playing on a iPhone 4 or because the game's just made like that. Either way, that aspect makes me regret paying even a dollar for this. I hope the performance for the game gets fixed.

[Causeless]

Sadly, horizontal craving is probably not possible. I assume this uses a heightmap, which wouldn't allow that.

Also, the actual planet itself isn't a sphere. It seems to use a torus in the engine internals; for example, if you have a horizontal line going across the entire planet with a slight gap in it, if you just go "up", relative to yourself, you will keep meeting the same gap over and over again instead of seeing the other side of the strip with would be filled in. It's a little hard to explain, maybe this would help:

"X" is where you are, and "H" is just terrain above the water line. A "N" means nothing is there.

[N][N][N][N]
[X][X][H][X]
[N][N][N][N]

Imagine this is connected in the same way a sphere would be. In this little game, if you were to go upwards, this happens:

[N][N][H][N]
[X][X][N][X]
[N][N][N][N]

And then:

[N][N][N][N]
[X][X][N][X]
[N][N][H][N]

And finally...

[N][N][N][N]
[X][X][H][X]
[N][N][N][N]

If it where a real sphere you would see the opposite, filled in part at the opposite side of the planet, but instead you seem to skip over that just seeing ocean until you return to the gap again.

EDIT:

I suggest that instead you'd have 6 grids in a cube, which is then deformed out into a sphere, but it looks like considering the game is already released that they'd hesitate such a big change.

EDIT 2:

After some experimentation and seeing this tweet: [url]https://twitter.com/GlennCorpes/status/256336144093036544[/url], I now know it's just a wrapping grid. The same as populous 3, then! I'd argue that's almost worse than a torus, but it really depends on what you want to achieve.

It is convincing, but I fear for the conditions if it is an RTS in that case. Because it is so much more fluid when moving around, I don't imagine stuff would be easy to understand as compared to a real sphere, but in the current state it's hard to create distinctive earth-like land so it's a little harder to see.

EDIT 3:

Nope, I was correct the first time. [url]https://twitter.com/GlennCorpes/status/256518239792795648[/url]. It's topologically a torus.

EDIT 4:

Actually, after some more thought, using a torus and a wrapping grid are really the same thing. However, it's a little easier to understand a torus as a 3d shape, but also with a torus it's possible to have 4 separate locations for everything on it allowing for a different behavior (so for example you wouldn't get the same infinite oceans issue).

Using a torus with 4 points (like so: [url]http://i.imgur.com/13YjD.png[/url]) really just swaps one set of issues for another.