Ooops…

Somewhere along the way in developing the last area, I broke the explosions…

This is what they’re looked before (some months ago):

This is how they looked at the beginning of the evening:

Terrible, especially in motion, in noticed every single “glob” of them, the ground was too dark… a mess altogether…

The problem, turns out, it was that I added a new render pass in the system (the effect pass), that is drawn after all the “solid” and “transparent” stuff… It’s also transparent, but it’s mostly used to allow for correct viewing of effects, especially in the last area, which has a lot of transparency all around…

Anyway, when I made the explosion effect, I didn’t have that, so it didn’t account for that extra pass, so it would get drawn twice (one of the transparency pass, another in the effect pass). Now, it only draws on the effect pass, which cause issues with transparent walls:

There’s no real solution to the alpha-blending problems, except sorting, and even that can’t guarantee success, since you’d have to sort “per-pixel”, and you can usually only sort “per-object”. And on Cantrip, I can’t even do that much… So, I think I’ll leave this rendering artifact in (it doesn’t happen that often in real game conditions)… Even a lot of AAA-games don’t deal with this properly (you can see this problem on a lot of places in “World of Warcraft”, for example).

The normal result for the explosion now is:

It looks way better, especially in movement…

Tomorrow, I’ll see if I can muster enough energy to tackle the main screen, so I can start playing the game again from the start (checking for obvious bugs), and more importantly, to finish “Phase One”.

Now listening to “Greatest Hits” by “Peter Gabriel”

Link of the Day: Very interesting read about the 3Cs (“Character, Controls, Camera”)… One of my pet-peeves in a lot of games (my own included), is bad camera/character controls… This article gives some structure to these thoughts: http://blog.digitaltutors.com/character-controls-camera-3cs-game-development/?inf_contact_key=3327b5632a440fe2f07c5e2ce3683236ff0d21c7a614573dbac5b4c876d50ebc