One of the main problems in my games is the GUI (Graphic User Interface)… I never really found a good way to build controls and iterate different GUIs, which led me to hating GUI work and usually doing a terrible job at it! On Grey, the GUI is very important, and as such I don’t […]
Although time hasn’t been abundant in these parts lately, I’ve managed to finish the new resource system with the dynamic update feature… Now, I can change any resource file used by the SurgePlayer (this has to be registered in code, so I don’t use too much processor on this, and so it can be optimized […]
Finally, after almost 57 hours of work, I’ve finished the refactoring of the resource system and adaptation of the SurgePlayer to use those changes! It’s a bit frustrating to be honest, to put in so many hours in a single task and the end result is everything looking exactly the same, but internally the system […]
I know, I know, we’ve been silent… But we’ve been working! On my part, I’ve been refactoring the resource system, and the task is almost complete for Spellbook and the Surge Player… Still need to tweak some minor bugs (and stuff I’ve found that was wrong for years and years!), but it’s mostly done, with […]
The highway to hell is full of good intentions! I wanted to focus on the development of the game itself, and I was creating a new enemy type (“Frost Touch”, a skeleton that slows down attacks when it hits). Visually, Frost Touch is different from the other skeletons because of a particle system: The effect […]
We haven’t had much time lately, been too tired after work to be productive. Anyway, we’ve added effect instancing to the editor… It’s still not complete, but although the effects have to be authored “by hand” in XML, we can now create and use them in the editor: That’s the frost bones effect, which is […]
There’s always regrets while coding, specially when we’re talking about a 10+ year codebase (with lots of refactoring, etc)… One of my main mistakes for ages was not to use matrix calculation. Of course, I used matrixes when it was time to deliver things to the graphics card, etc, but other than that, I ran […]
RealJob™ has been kicking my butt lately, and I’m waiting on the GUI work so I’ll be able to progress more in the development of the game itself; but none of these reasons has stopped me from work! Lately, most of what I’ve been doing is backend system coding, stuff like refactoring the collision/intersection system, […]
The reason why we’ve been so quiet is that we’ve been working (finally) on the game systems themselves and the gameplay is starting to take shape! First, I finished the “highlight” effect, that kicks in when the mouse cursor is on top of something that can be interacted with: First I tried making a simple […]
In my test arena, I had some performance issues in same places, where about 9 lights were shinning in a greater or smaller degree… Considering that in a deferred renderer, the main issue is bandwidth (each shaded pixel needs at least 64 bytes of data to come in from texture memory – the G-Buffer), I […]