Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Technology

Finished with props…

Finally finished with props! Had to go into the maps and readjust positions because of the change in pivot point, but now the system is working very nicely! Also added a FPS counter on the game, because I had the feeling that the rendering on OpenGL was slower than on D3D9, but it ended up […]

Pirate lair props done!

Finished the props on the pirate lairs, which involved adjusting the pivot points of most assets in the game… Now I need to work on all the maps to account for this… It’s boring work, but easy enough (except the part where I have to add prop manipulation to the editor, which shouldn’t be too […]

More work on props

Today I managed to fix one of the bugs that, although not game breaking, annoyed me the most: props in front of doorways: To do this, I just check the bounding box of the prop with the bounding box of the door… This was a bit of a headache because the coordinate spaces are different […]

Fixing props

Now I’m working on something boring: fixing small stuff… In this case, prop placement on the pirate lairs. Currently, a lot of the props get in front of doors, have wrong bounding boxes, etc. For example: In this case, the table has a bad pivot point and the size is not aligned with the voxel […]

OpenGL Ambient Occlusion

Finished the ambient occlusion system, in OpenGL as well… Before: After: Also arrived to the conclusion that I can’t really use the ambient occlusion to make the sprite shadows (they’re too small to actually impact the occlusion properly)… So I’ll have to use either the shadow system (still under consideration) or the decal system (waiting […]

Tweaking

Today I didn’t have much time to work on the game, so I basically just tweaked the ambient occlusion parameters and saw where they went… First experiment was to see if better filtering would help the algorithm… Of course, the filtering improves the effect, but visually it doesn’t add anything, so I’ll keep the low-cost […]

A bit disappointed…

…with the results of the ambient occlusion in practice… It works fine now, but it’s extremely difficult to notice, which makes this whole endeavor kind of pointless… The effect is clearly there (note the corners and the far edges of the shelves), but it doesn’t help much with the whole lack of contrast I wanted […]

Almost done!

After a long battle with almost every single line of code of the screenspace effect system, I managed to get something resembling ambient occlusion! Now I need to add a blur filter to remove the artifacts and I can run tests on the actual scenes, see how good they look, and to see if I […]

So ashamed…

Finally figured out what was the problem with my reconstruction of the position from the FOV and depth… NOTHING! ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! The problem was way before that… For some reason (and I never noticed it for years on end), I was using the field of view parameter as the VERTICAL field of view, scaled by […]

Close, but not there…

Found some of the problems of the system yesterday, but the results are still terrible: It was inverted on this screenshot due to lack of correction of texture coordinates to screen coordinates. Anyway, the problem I’m having is reconstructing the camera-relative position of the pixels, based on the depth and field-of-view… Something is going wrong […]