Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Yearly Archives: 2015

Almost done with the refactoring…

Tomorrow I’ll probably be done with the refactoring of the new rendering pipeline… With this one I’m getting way more control over the whole rendering system, which will help me get the decals working properly… Then I can move to more interesting (and visual) stuff! Now listening to “The Classical Conspiracy” by “Epica”

More refactoring…

Stage 1 of the refactoring is done… It just replicates what was already working: The only difference is internally… I create a scene graph and render that, instead of iterating all the objects… And even that is not completely done, since the elements of the scene graph are most of the time just a pointer […]

Refactoring the rendering…

Yep, that’s what I’m doing… It will be a bit painful and I’ll get a lot of bugs in the process, but I think it’s the best thing at this moment… Currently, the rendering is working in a per-pass/per-object basis… So, first we get the solid pass, iterate objects, render all of them (and they […]

More issues with decals…

Unfortunately, my initial idea that screen-space decals was some sort of magic bullet was completely wrong… They work great a lot of the time, easy to implement, fast… but (there’s always a but) they have some small details which break it down… The issue I talked about yesterday was mostly solved with the stencil buffer: […]

What’s life without some problems?!…

Well… Just finished implementing decals… It went better than expected, since I’ve never tried implementing screen-space decals before… The main difficulty of screen-space decals is the occlusion. Most of the code is related to this, and mine is working great: One problem I’m already seeing is the fact that the way the decal maps removes […]

Started with decals

One of the effects I would like to use extensively in the game is “decals”… A decal is just a kind of painting you put on top of the geometry. Decals used to be done by intersecting the world geometry with the decal shape and drawing those polygons, but since I now have the normal/depth […]

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 […]