Most of these three weeks went into a question I have wanted to answer since the start of the project: what does this world look like when you keep zooming out?
Zooming out, one epoch at a time
In Epoch 2, a hex covers about three metres of ground. Humanity Ascends is designed to grow in scale with every epoch, so I have started building a world view that shows where that journey leads. A world button in the corner menu lifts the camera out of the village, plus and minus step between the scales, and dragging pans across the land. Here is the whole zoom in one take:
Each step matches the planned scale of a later epoch:
- 32x: the wild Isar with its gravel bars and single trees, about 96 metres per hex (Epoch 3).
- 256x: the Isar valley, about 770 metres per hex (Epoch 4).
- 2048x: Bavaria, with the Isar running to the Danube, about 6 kilometres per hex (Epoch 5).
- 8192x: from the Danube to the Alps, about 25 kilometres per hex (Epoch 6).
- And finally, the globe.
The wider views are not a painted map. They are built from real elevation data and from the same rules the game uses for its own forests, rivers, and wetlands, so every step shows the same place from higher up. Moving between the steps is a short camera flight, without a loading pause.
The world view is still a work in progress. The closer steps are coming together, but the wider views, the valley scale in particular, need more art work before I am happy with them.
A wilder Isar
The river beside the Epoch 2 settlement changed character along the way. The Isar is now a wild braided river, as it was long before it was tamed: a pale gravel bed about 200 metres wide, with water threads that split and rejoin around overgrown islands and reed backwaters.
The water is a muted turquoise, lakes darken towards their deep middles, and standing water gathers in scattered ponds and oxbows instead of wide lakes along the river. Trees keep out of the pond shallows, and the gravel no longer repeats the same stones from hex to hex.
Smaller improvements
- The game has moved to the latest version of Unity.
- In Epoch 1, dug tuber patches and harvested seed pods now regrow as themselves instead of turning into sticks.
- Animals stay correctly visible under fog of war, even mid-move or after fleeing, and grazing animals take shorter routes and turn more cleanly.
- Epoch 2 placement previews now account for plough teams on farms and shore trips for fishing huts, and settlement dogs automatically join the hunters.
- Farm fields spread over their surrounding hexes, and a flicker across the whole screen near wheat fields is gone.
That is where things stand. The next update follows in about three weeks.