Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Development

Per-pixel lighting

First draft of the per-pixel lighting on “Gateway”… It’s a bit hard to see the effect, because the vertex density is quite high normally. Per vertex: Per pixel: You can notice it especially on the edge of light behind the player… Still missing the per-pixel lighting on the other shaders of the game, but it […]

Issue with bitfields

On my rendering system, I’m using something I call a “render environment” to compile the right version of the shader. This has data like how many lights are active, what types, what components are enabled on the mesh (normal, how many texture coordinates), what render pass are we doing, etc. This is stored on a […]

Landing cutscene

The transition between being on the ship and being on the planet was a bit abrupt, it felt disconnected in some way, so I’ve added a small cutscene that shows the ship landing on the planet… This way the game feels more “continuous”… Now listening to “Nifelvind” by “Finntroll” Link of the Day: This is […]

Attack slots

The AI on Gateway searches for an attack slot on the target. That’s used to stop the AIs from clustering on a single position. They request an attack slot to the target, and they keep refreshing it, until they lose it if they don’t target it anymore. Until now, the attack slots were attributed in […]

Polished explosions

Somewhere in the last updates (OpenGL and even before), I spoiled the explosion effect: Fixing it was relatively easy, but then I noticed that the explosion was missing smoke particles: Unfortunately, adding smoke particles would require some depth sorting, or else the explosion would loose its brightness, which is not what I wanted… After mucking […]

New pulse cannon effect

Still working on the game polish, focusing on the weapon effects, mostly replacing the old “line drawing” effect for a better effect, using actual quad rendering and pre-multiplied alpha: Looks much better than the old version (of which I can’t find any screenshots ). Polish phase is fun but very time consuming! Now listening to […]

Minor polish

Today I mostly fixed small things that were on the polish list for ages now, like transparent map display (and better filtering on it), and other dozens of small items: Sometimes this takes way longer than it should, not from an actual work perspective, but just deciding if 60% opacity is better than 50% and […]