The biggest hit from the last weekend is an improved render, but lets maintain the order of events and start from top.
Firstly there was a lot of work on the water shader and overall rigging of it with the rest of the render pipeline. Water requires additional rendering pass over terrain with reflected camera to capture the reflections into a texture, that then gets projected on to a water surface. And since these are shaders, there’s also another trick in rendering the same terrain but clipping it to water areas to access waterbed depth – which means terrain gets rendered once again. Which did not fit well with inherited single-pass render. But it’s mostly solved now, with except for water areas setup (cover, height, waterbody properties). Beautifying water is another task altogether.
Then there was separation of atmosphere settings and addition of the fog into shaders:
Fog
Fog is a “cheap” effect, which games use mostly for 2 goals – hide the distant geomerty from rendering and to add a sense of distance to the world. In this render fog is specially made more dense and milky for now, later I will tune it to look more natural and don’t spoil much of the games colors.
Adding water and then fog to the game were the last straws – performance plummeted down to barely acceptable 19fps on a simple test map with 3 dozens of units and a bunch of houses by the lake. Weekend was spent on that problem. Solution was trivial – put the GPU to work and start using it for caching geometry. Results are impressive, ingame fps rocketed up to 119fps (more than x6 improvement!). There are bunch of thins left to cleanup, but overall I’m very satisfied with how it is going so far 🙂
Last 2 evenings I’ve spent researching into water rendering tutorials, looking for a nice water effect shader. It is quite hard to find one. Most of the times the result is less than satisfactory and older OpenGL functions are used, resulting in complicated pipeline. Luckily I have found a few good ones, so here’s my first attempt – this is a test-bed example:
Notice how deep water has more deep colors and how far away water surface is more reflective. Colors and coefficients can be tweaked to make water look more muddy or crystal clear. Shallow water with the same as above settings looks good too:
There are no ripples and no sun specular highlight yet, I might add them later or see into trying out a different water shader first. This one has some imperfections:
See the deep water color, when the water depth changes quickly it is noticeable that the volume color is rendered on the water surface. That wont be noticeable much in the game, if there are no plateaus underwater. Another limitation is that only flat water surface is allowed and that surface has to be one per whole map. I can make it 2-3, but that would eat some more performance, because each next one will require additional rendering pass (~30% fps).
Questions for discussion:
– single flat water surface per level, is that acceptable?
– several unconnected flat water surfaces per level, is that acceptable?
– how important for mapmaking is to be able to edit water height level for each tile?
– anything related?
Another week has passed without major news.. It seems there are no news at all.. How about some more artwork then? The new artwork comes from a freelance artist. Meet the builder:
Builder
This guy is a core of the Next Game world, he builds it all. Given enough stone, timber and time, he can build a full-blown Castle all by himself! Isn’t that impressive 😉
Last week was low on progress.
What has been done:
Now hopefully I will have move on to more interesting areas 🙂
Here’s another idea mentioned by TheDarkLord in the previous ideas topic: Camp-Wagons (CW for short). CWs could enrich the game by allowing the player to choose where his town will start. It could be an interesting addition to the game.
Wood ware icon got a deeper shade, new repair icon (might be used for Build menu instead?), and a Quarry icon (might add a stone to the left corner). Icons are scaled x2 from the actual size for preview purposes.
I’m planning the bow to remain that simple. Next tier bowman will have a much better one (probably a long-bow?). Quiver obviously needs more work and some arrows inside.
The goal of it:
Key points for a camp:
Usually it is the Camp that the player starts the mission with (unless there’s a more developed town). Player can build any number of Camps. Both Camp and Store take the same space (4×4 tiles). Camp is transformed into a Store via upgrade. While upgrade in the progress, Camp keep functioning as usual. Once the upgrade is complete – additional storage space is unlocked. Upgrade button is located within Camp user-interface and available only if the required amount of building materials are inside.
From what I recall, AoE had a similar Store upgrade that would trigger advancement into a next age (Bronze, Metal, etc). There the upgrade was quite epic in cost and time.
As usual, feedback is welcome!
Do you know examples of similar functionality in other games, how do they work and what pros/cons do they have?
These weeks summer came to city, the weather is hot and distractions are plenty. Still there is some progress report (pics inside).
Unit animations receiving an overhaul. According to new rendering engine, everything should change from fixed-step to floating-step.
