Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Technology

More shooting!

Carried on the work from yesterday, fine tuning the shooting mechanisms… It’s now working properly, with two easily adjusted parameters, and I even have a new parameter for the accuracy of the weapon (a machine gun shouldn’t hit as often as a pistol). The high-level enemies may still have too much accuracy, but on the […]

Shooting time!

Working on a new AI shooting system… The current system uses a sine-wave altered by the danger level of the enemy and some parameters (frequency and threshold)… This is hard to control, and the fact that enemies shoot or not against you is dependent on where in the curve you’re at the moment… So, I […]

Still moss…

This took a bit longer than expected… Had to implement a decent Perlin noise implementation, and had to do a million tweaks… First, I had to go back on the drawing board (thought I had an error), and build a decal that shows the ambient occlusion (which looks fairly cool!): Then I had to create […]

Moss

I’m trying to add a glowy alien moss to the asteroids, based on the decal code, but using a kind of spherical projection instead of the planar one… The first run, I tried using a cube map… If I’d thought about this for a bit, instead of going straight for implementation, I’d reached the conclusion […]

Load and save

Today I worked with the savegames, adding descriptions and fixing bugs introduced with the jump to multithreading… Most of the work was mainly finding out what the problem were! Lately I feel I’ve been working mostly with bug fixing, which is boring, so I think my next step is to add something new/fun… I got […]

60 FPS!

Tadam! Found the issue with the frame rate… The game is running at a good framerate, but due to some old code, the frame rate got locked to 50 FPS, which in a normal monitor that refreshes at 60 Hz causes some jumps in the image… “So, Covenant, you just had to change a variable […]

Optimization

I wasn’t happy with the performance of the game in certain points, with drops to 30 or 40 FPS, as measured by Fraps… So, I decided to dust off my profiling tools and try to figure out where were the bottlenecks, but when I was running the initial benchmarks I got a very strange issue: […]

Rollercoaster!

This is the best definition for today… It started great, adding new content the artist built: Also fixed a lot of small stuff, like making the player fall to the ground when he’s killed in flight, or selecting an upgrade automatically when purchasing things in the shop… But then I started hitting bugs… a lot […]

More polish and bug fixing…

As the title indicates, mostly that kind of work… The bugs were mostly small things, like the way one of the voxel faces UVs were not correctly mapped, moving the near plane of the camera when it was too close, etc… Also polished some things related to the camera controls… Now the character will turn […]

Asteroid

Today I did mostly polish on the game. First I worked on giving some visual feedback to the player about where he can or not fly the ship: Then I added code to build “asteroid planets”, much more irregular… It was a bit hard reaching the balance of “don’t want to code this whole thing […]