Starting work on the arena…

The merge tool is finally done, and while it was a truckload of work, it was worth it for the amount of small bugs I found… Nothing was too serious or hard to fix, but most where quite complicated to find and would be hard to fix later!

I’m finally finished with all the detours I’m willing to let myself make, and started working on the arena itself…

Work has been progressing slowly, since I’m always finding small bugs and we’re still fine tuning the visual aspects of the game…

Most of the work is converting the old code I had on the prototype to the new framework I’ve built, looking at the code to see if there’s something that can be improved, since what I’m going to do on the next weeks is going to shape most of the code development process…

From a visual perspective, we’re not too happy with how the shadows are behaving… If you look at the above screenshot carefully, because we have two lights at the same distance and with the same intensity, there’s no visible shadow on Grey, which doesn’t make me happy (it seems like he’s floating in the air). If I was using a HDR pipeline, this wouldn’t happen, because between the tone-mapping and the added light resolution, things would work fine… but since I’m avoiding that path, we need to find another way to get better shadowing on the character, like reducing the light amount in the scene or something else…

I’m also not happy on how specular highlights are showing up when the characters are this small, since they tend to just “jitter” a lot… Maybe I can fix that by reducing specular highlights on the mipmaps…

There’s also some issues with the precedence of some animations that has to be sorted, so that he doesn’t go into “idle mode” while he’s walking…

Anyway, lots of work ahead, but this is fun code to do (albeit frustrating sometimes…)