måndag 21 mars 2011

Ladys and gents...

I can tell that you people have been starving for something more than screen-shots and empty words for a while now, so I thought it was time for something more interesting...

So... without more delay... I happily present: The first movie.

Nothing to fancy just yet, I am showing off some of the basic features in the engine, but there is more to come, so don't worry :)

And that is not all, I'm also happy to say that I am the proud owner of Liero3D.net *drum sound*
and some web-space at One.com.
I'm currently prioritizing the game engine, so the page will probably stay "empty" for a little while longer ;)

Note:
Any feedback if ofcourse wellcome, as long as it don't involve the particles lack of shading :P

tisdag 15 mars 2011

sweet shades!

Just as i expected, the texture based "Ambient Occlusion" effect looks a hundred times better than the previous vertex based one, and I'm almost finished with it! :)

There are a few blocks missing(you can see that some corners are not shaded) but this will be fixed very soon.

I will also change the way I write blog posts, it looks like people really don't like my rambling over the last month(apparently visitor number plumbed from 680 to 160 in one month), so i will try to make it more interesting.

From now on, I will write shorter posts, and only post new messages if i have some new cool pictures or movies to show :)

Youtube video will be up shortly, I only want to add some gore and worms to blow up ;-)





Note: The shadows are a bit over the top atm, I will make them slightly lighter.

lördag 12 mars 2011

To fake a fake

70% of all woman are faking it...
But I wonder how many who need to fake the fake?

After trying a SSAO shader and seeing some unsatisfying performance(on a very primitive example) , I decided to look into alternative solutions that would be faster to render and could work on older machines.

So I did a simple test where i darkened vertexes next to other blocks, and it looks something like this:



It looks really bad in a few spots, and quite good in others, but on average it is not as good as I was hoping for, so my next attempt will be to use gradient shaded textures instead.

Currently things are only evenly gradient, but I want the shadows to be stronger the closer you get to a corner, This is not possible to do when we color the vertices's directly, but would be very simple to do on a texture.

This is of course a very fake way to do "Ambient Occlusion", but considering that we get it almost for free, I can live with it.

Note: The picture to the right has slightly darker shadows.

torsdag 3 mars 2011

Feeling the pressure

With only 2 days left to the game-dev LAN, I'm starting to feel the pressure...

Unfortunately, I wont manage to implement everything i wanted to implement, but i hope i will have most of the important ones from my TODO list.

some of them are:

  • Instanced based voxel Particles for blood, explosion fragments and dirt.
  • A few pre-set weapons used for demonstration in free-camera mode.
  • A few dummy objects to blow up, generating cascades of blood and gore that paint the terrain red :)

hopefully i can also put together a more decent and more presentable loading screen, but it don't have very high priority, probably the very last thing i do if i have time to spare.

Things that i wont have time for:

  • SSAO(this really bothers me, it would have made my project 100x more presentable and attractive to view).
  • Depth of field.
  • Player physics.
  • Some form of simple multiplayer test.

It really is sad that i wont have time to implement multiplayer before the LAN, it would have been awesome to test play the game with the other people there, but I guess we cant have it all :3

I have spent the last 2 days messing with the instancing for my particle effects.
And I think I have everything solved(except for some performance penalty to be solved later).

If things goes well, the particle engine should be implement into the engine today, and unless any unforeseen problem should arrive, perhaps record a short tec-demo and upload to youtube :)

[Edit]
The particleManager is implemented and running very smoth, I'm very happy with the performance and how it works(pre-loading and recycle old particles).

But i forgot that the custom shader i used for instancing would create problems with fog...
so until this is solved, I don't feel its worth making a movie and upload to youtube, I would only regret it later.

If only i had a working Depth of field class, it would not create the same problem, and everything would look awesome! :D