Alpha 5 patch 9 hotfix 55 — Ostriv Steam update #223710

Here I'm gonna touch a subject of an explosion of complexity in case of adding another kind of freedom for a player. In the previous post I mentioned a new feature for some of the free-form buildings which will have this freedom. In Alpha 5 some buildings could be given any form as long as it has 4 sides and stays convex. Getting rid of that limitation sounds as simple as just adding more points, but in reality a lot of optimizations and code simplifications relied on that. Convex shapes math is much more simple than concave. Take pavement for example, as it's the simplest case. Graphically it is straightforward: you generate a quad of two triangles, render them to texture map and use this map in terrain fragment shader to apply cobblestone texture where needed. To support more advanced concave polygonal forms you only need to add actual triangulation (converting the polygon to a set of ...