Planting on Dinosaur Island.

How we plant on Dinosaur Island; screen capture of the planting interface.

How we plant on Dinosaur Island; screen capture of the planting interface.

It’s spring on Dinosaur Island and that means it’s time to start planting! Above is a screen capture of the interface to add plants to Dinosaur Island, select the terrain / environment in which they grow (remember all the work on creating the terrain previously?), select images for the plants for their three stages of development (we have an agreement with xFrog who created these prehistoric plants, and, lastly, ‘plant’ this vegetation in the appropriate terrain / environment.

We’re looking at starting off with 20 different types of plants and trees. We will be tracking each individual plant, shrub or tree throughout its entire life cycle. We will also track its health.

The above screen capture is another glimpse ‘behind the scenes’ of Dinosaur Island. Most users probably won’t want to get this involved, but we need to have this capability to create different environments, with the appropriate flora, for the various eras of dinosaurs.

Things are progressing rapidly on Dinosaur Island. Next week: see the results of planting all these ferns, bushes and trees. And, after that, it’s time for the dinosaurs!

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The terrain of Dinosaur Island.

Dinosaur Island terrain displayed in false colors.

Dinosaur Island terrain displayed in false colors.

Above is a view of Dinosaur Island with the different terrain types displayed in vivid or ‘false colors’. Below is a view of the same terrain types displayed as a transparency over the elevation map of the island.

The terrain of Dinosaur Island displayed as a transparency over the elevation map.

The terrain of Dinosaur Island displayed as a transparency over the elevation map.

Terrain type legend.

Terrain type legend.

The color legend of the different terrain types is at left.

This is exciting news! Well, it is for us on the team because it means that we now have the tools to rapidly create islands and ‘paint’ with the different terrain types. This should be exciting news for you, too, because this means that users (like you) can create your own Dinosaur Islands, too!

So, what’s next?

We will be adding the interface so we can start ‘planting’ vegetation around the island. Every plant grows only in certain terrains. Now you know why we had to create the ‘terrain map’ of Dinosaur Island first.

You know what happens after we add the plants? We start adding the dinosaurs that live on the plants!

 

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