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 […]
Added the flow shader to the lava, looks great! Maybe it’s a bit too orange/yellow, maybe red/yellow would be better, but I suck at textures! :\ Also added the fiery waterfalls, but can’t decide which of the variations I like the most… I change opinions every 10 minutes… Will have to ask the artist about […]
I’ve started another polish stage, now dedicated to the lava worlds… Old generation would generate something like this: Not natural at all, and quite ugly most of the time, especially when you see it on the map… There was also a lot of glitches and bugs, like the one below (in case it’s not too […]
Today I spent my evening trying to optimize the map generation (when the player lands on a planet) and the area generation (when the player changes areas). The map generation takes about 15 seconds on a normal map (this can be a bit more or less, but this is a good average), which is very […]
Today I dedicated the evening in working on bugs… Squashed a lot of those, most of it stuff I broken on previous refactorings and others that I knew about forever but didn’t want to fix because that sucks! List includes (but is not limited to): Skybox is now unaffected by the fog Scorch marks now […]
Finally finished the water courses and lakes (with reusable code for lava, etc)! Added waterfalls to water drops: Gives the scene a bit more life, I think… Also ported the water shader to HLSL (screenshots below were taken with D3D renderer), and fixed some issues with the tree placement… All in all, a great day! […]
Today I managed to make the flow of water work on the lakes… in the process I also found some bugs with the terrain generation code that I had to fix… First, without any change to the flow system, this is what I got: It was a quite neat effect, to be honest… but the […]