Started the polishing of the alien planet… This is the initial state: Very barren, looks artificial,etc… Started by the usual places: getting the water flow/rivers working, improving the terrain generation… My focus was really off today, so this went way slower than it should… Then I added crystals to the landscape, which helps with the […]
Today was mostly a bug-hunting day, but I had time to do other stuff… First things first, I removed one of the big bugs in the game: a raycast issue that would sometimes cause the game to freeze… This was very hard to detect, but after I found a way to replicate it consistently, it […]
Finished the polish of the swamp level… Quite impressive, to be honest, since I was expecting it to take more or less the same time as the previous ones… Added a rain effect, which worked great! And then, for good measure, added some droplets in the water, to simulate the splash, using some decals: The […]
Today I started polishing the swamp… First, I added the water with the flow… This was way more work than it should, but since I don’t have rivers, I don’t have a notion of flow, so I had to invent one… Basically, what happens here is that the water will try to move in one […]
So, better camp sites (more seamless with the surroundings): And then I decided to tackle a bug that was plaguing me for some time: the world generation on Direct3D and OpenGL were yielding different results: OpenGL on the left, D3D9 on the right… Way different… After a load of time and logging, I finally found […]
Not much time to work on the game today, so I mostly took care of some outstanding bugs related to the placement of enemies. This sort of case would happen pretty often: Note that spawner would overlap the lava… The issue was that when considering places to position enemies, I’d only search for a single […]
Today I tackled a difficult subsystem: the “make sure you can walk everywhere” system. I have a system that makes sure the player can walk on all the game area, and usually it would raise/lower terrain to achieve that… That work relatively well, but with the rivers, etc, lowering and raising terrain would sometimes screw […]
Just added atmospheric effects to the lava world, to simulate burning ash in the atmosphere… I feel it adds a bit of life to the scene, and I can reuse the same concept for the snow and rain on other levels… I’m using a particle system that spawns on the camera… When the camera moves, […]
Today I didn’t have much time available, so I focused on something I believed to be simple. In the previous system, facilities like temples, pirate lairs, etc, would be generated after the terrain (and the water bodies) are generated, which meant that sometimes they would overlap… So, if we had the water bodies like so: […]
Just added fire jets to the lava environment… This is just an environmental effect, doesn’t affect gameplay, but it helps keep the world a bit more “alive”. Took me way longer than I wanted, but it works fine and adds a certain charm to the location… The next step is a whole class of atmospheric […]