Today was mostly a bug-hunting day, but I had time to do other stuff… First things first, I removed one of the big bugs in the game: a raycast issue that would sometimes cause the game to freeze… This was very hard to detect, but after I found a way to replicate it consistently, it […]
Finished the polish of the swamp level… Quite impressive, to be honest, since I was expecting it to take more or less the same time as the previous ones… Added a rain effect, which worked great! And then, for good measure, added some droplets in the water, to simulate the splash, using some decals: The […]
Today I started polishing the swamp… First, I added the water with the flow… This was way more work than it should, but since I don’t have rivers, I don’t have a notion of flow, so I had to invent one… Basically, what happens here is that the water will try to move in one […]
So, better camp sites (more seamless with the surroundings): And then I decided to tackle a bug that was plaguing me for some time: the world generation on Direct3D and OpenGL were yielding different results: OpenGL on the left, D3D9 on the right… Way different… After a load of time and logging, I finally found […]
Today I tackled a difficult subsystem: the “make sure you can walk everywhere” system. I have a system that makes sure the player can walk on all the game area, and usually it would raise/lower terrain to achieve that… That work relatively well, but with the rivers, etc, lowering and raising terrain would sometimes screw […]
Just added atmospheric effects to the lava world, to simulate burning ash in the atmosphere… I feel it adds a bit of life to the scene, and I can reuse the same concept for the snow and rain on other levels… I’m using a particle system that spawns on the camera… When the camera moves, […]
Today I didn’t have much time available, so I focused on something I believed to be simple. In the previous system, facilities like temples, pirate lairs, etc, would be generated after the terrain (and the water bodies) are generated, which meant that sometimes they would overlap… So, if we had the water bodies like so: […]
Just added fire jets to the lava environment… This is just an environmental effect, doesn’t affect gameplay, but it helps keep the world a bit more “alive”. Took me way longer than I wanted, but it works fine and adds a certain charm to the location… The next step is a whole class of atmospheric […]
Added the flow shader to the lava, looks great! Maybe it’s a bit too orange/yellow, maybe red/yellow would be better, but I suck at textures! :\ Also added the fiery waterfalls, but can’t decide which of the variations I like the most… I change opinions every 10 minutes… Will have to ask the artist about […]
I’ve started another polish stage, now dedicated to the lava worlds… Old generation would generate something like this: Not natural at all, and quite ugly most of the time, especially when you see it on the map… There was also a lot of glitches and bugs, like the one below (in case it’s not too […]