Well, this was unexpected and shows the highly mutable nature of game development… When I started of on this asteroid polishing, I wanted to add alien moss… After a lot of experiments, tweaks, texturing, shader work, etc, I got to something that’s way simpler, but looks better: cracks on the ground! It’s better than the […]
This took a bit longer than expected… Had to implement a decent Perlin noise implementation, and had to do a million tweaks… First, I had to go back on the drawing board (thought I had an error), and build a decal that shows the ambient occlusion (which looks fairly cool!): Then I had to create […]
I’m trying to add a glowy alien moss to the asteroids, based on the decal code, but using a kind of spherical projection instead of the planar one… The first run, I tried using a cube map… If I’d thought about this for a bit, instead of going straight for implementation, I’d reached the conclusion […]
Today I worked with the savegames, adding descriptions and fixing bugs introduced with the jump to multithreading… Most of the work was mainly finding out what the problem were! Lately I feel I’ve been working mostly with bug fixing, which is boring, so I think my next step is to add something new/fun… I got […]
Tadam! Found the issue with the frame rate… The game is running at a good framerate, but due to some old code, the frame rate got locked to 50 FPS, which in a normal monitor that refreshes at 60 Hz causes some jumps in the image… “So, Covenant, you just had to change a variable […]
I wasn’t happy with the performance of the game in certain points, with drops to 30 or 40 FPS, as measured by Fraps… So, I decided to dust off my profiling tools and try to figure out where were the bottlenecks, but when I was running the initial benchmarks I got a very strange issue: […]
The more we approach the end of the development cycle, the more bugs we fine… or more precisely, the less we can ignore them and hope they don’t happen again… I’m having a nasty bug that I have no idea what causes it and I can’t replicate it consistently… When I run the game in […]
Today was a full day… I did a bit of bug fixing, related to turrets and traps and collision detection: Also added some polish in the end of the laser beam, and worked on testing recording gameplay video, so I can prepare to start doing some marketing stuff, contract press, and some SEO with the […]
This is the best definition for today… It started great, adding new content the artist built: Also fixed a lot of small stuff, like making the player fall to the ground when he’s killed in flight, or selecting an upgrade automatically when purchasing things in the shop… But then I started hitting bugs… a lot […]
As the title indicates, mostly that kind of work… The bugs were mostly small things, like the way one of the voxel faces UVs were not correctly mapped, moving the near plane of the camera when it was too close, etc… Also polished some things related to the camera controls… Now the character will turn […]