progress report

Didn't get alot done today.

* some small optimizations to the post-processing stage
* rebuilt the DOF pass to utilize a half-rez downsampled screen texture. this not only yields a performance boost but also gives a meatier blur. still have to fix that fucking foreground leaking...

Progress Update

I am going to post daily progress updates so I can track my productivity starting today. Here's what I worked on/accomplished today.

* Optimized the render pipeline a bit. Engine runs much faster now. This was a major victory.
* Worked on the .obj file loader system. almost done
* worked on improving the DOF feature. could run faster and also the foreground leaks MUST be fixed.

A long period between updates

which is odd because the gap between updates has seen the engine progress more so than ever.

I don't feel like posting about all of what i've been working on just yet. so in the meantime here's a screenshot.

BLOOM BITCHES!

The engine now has bloom lighting, and also the beginnings of HDR!
Much rejoicing in the streets!

with Bloom:



In other news, I'm currently working on the World-builder tools. You can see it in it's infancy in that shot, with sloped dynamic terrain. Each segment of terrain can be a different texture, have different decorations (like grass, rocks, cacti, etc), and a different surface (which is two-pronged: it will affect gameplay physics like friction, and visually it will trigger different shaders)

A look at a more finalized "Spirit form" shader

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been busy working on the world-builder for the game, and other more practical, non-renderer work. Also tax-time has forced me to work on other projects to keep afloat... doh!

Here's a look at the "spirit form" shader.

Damage Shader

The shader that tells the player "you're almost dead, moron". Finished.

Basically it takes whatever pixels are the on left and right side of the screen, blurs them based on X position, then over-exposes the red value of the pixel, resulting in this fully-conceived version of the "death haze" shader I posted earlier. Next on the shader to-do list is bump-mapping. At some point I'll be adding displacement (warping) effects as well. If it's possible I'd really like to have a full HDR lighting pipeline for the game too... but that might be pushing it. Totally possible if we end up adding 1 or 2 other programmers to the team. At this point it's just me, about 3 artists, and a writer/co-designer :)

Fullscreen shader fun

Well it was a bit of a bitch to get working right, but after about a day of f**king with it, I finally got a Frame Buffer Object implemented in the engine. This coupled with my custom shaders yields some interesting results.

Next on the agenda will be finishing up the stencil shadow system, and hooking up a parallax bump-mapping shader to our buildings. The shader-side of it shouldn't be too hard as I already have a shader to perform parallax mapping, but I have to re-code the function that loads in our 3d models, which is kind of pissing me off because I thought I had a good function that worked. It was pretty n00b by most standards (it simply grabbed vertex and triangle arrays from .h files then drew them using openGL's glDrawElements() function), but it worked well for some stuff. But I finally realized I need to do things the right way and load from actual model files. We'll be using md2's, with each frame of the model file being a different variation of the building (so we don't have 30 identical grocery stores in the damn game world)

Ultimately I'll need to build a system for handling different materials on the different parts and pieces of each building. Hell maybe it will end up being a bit like Lego...

Enjoy some prototypical shader screengrabs:

Satanic hazy red filter (I'm thinking this will be great for when one of your host bodies is just about kaput)

Outside a host body, the ghost's connection to our physical realm is iffy at best, this is reflected with this bitchin shader that creates a blur+overexposure effect, for vaguely metaphysical goodness.

This final screenshot illustrates how things look when "all is well" (ie. when you have a host body and are not taking severe damage). No shader no cry...

Status update

Finally got shaders working in the engine!
I'm on cloud 9 right now. It's taken a long time but we finally have a basic blur+over-exposure shader working in the engine. I'll be implementing a frame-buffer object soon, so we can displace, blur, and in general F up the game world accordingly using our lovely shaders, next.

After that I plan on finishing up a simple stencil-buffer shadow system. And then after that I've decided I'm going to discipline myself here, and suspend all work on the renderer, and just concentrate on gameplay programming and design for the rest of the time leading up to GDC.
(to clarify we are not showing the game at GDC, we will be attending though and talking to publishers)

Heightmap Grass

Busted ass on an extra feature for the heightmap tech: grass sprites. Still needs some optimization but it's looking pretty good.

New developments

Holy crap it's been almost 2 months since I posted anything here. Whats funny is in the past 2 months so much has happened with the project, and yet I haven't posted about it.

First of all, the engine continues to shape up nicely, the graphics renderer is really starting to mature and soon we'll be introducing shaders.

2nd of all we not only have support for 3d model structures in the game, but we also have basic lighting in the game as well.

We have fully functional particle emitters which look awesome. They will be great for blood fx. (in layman's terms basically it's an object that shoots out XX number of say, blood drops, for example, then deletes itself)

We also have proper perspective, and now have a huge plain of terrain going off into the distance. Today I added heightmapping technology to the game. It's going to need some work and it runs a bit slow but I'm confident I'll be able to straighten out these minor issues, and wow does it add alot to the visuals.

And finally a HUGE announcement. The game now has a new 2D artist:

Jay Ziebarth AKA "Zeebarf", acclaimed artist and animator, of TV's "Sons of Butcher" and the online game series "The Journeys of Reemus" fame.

!!!

Here's a more recent dev pic. (final game won't look much like this, but this is closer to what it'll look like than the last pic I posted in November).