Sunday, June 22, 2014
Here we go...final week Once again I'm scattered all over the place, and am doing a lot of various polishing work. But today I'm actually most excited about the continuation of the zone tech, so I just want to talk about that quickly and get back to work
Tech: Polygonization of Zone Boundaries
I mentioned yesterday that we can automatically create meshes for zones by using their field functions in the same way that we create procedural meshes for other objects in the game. Today I implemented it! I now have zone meshes that allow me to see the exact shape and location of zone boundaries. I still don't have the shader for them implemented yet (the boundary mesh should begin to fade out as you approach it), nor have I figured out how to texture it to make a convincing LOD representation of zones.
But it's definitely a step in the right direction
Tech: Toroidal Zones for Planetary Rings
Today I finally leveraged my arbitrarily-shaped zone tech to implement dynamically-loading planetary rings! It's simple enough with the new zone tech: all I had to do is implement a new field function for toroidal fields. Using a single torus and some scaling, I can get exactly the kind of shape that you would expect for a planetary ring.
The best part? Well...everything else just works, since the engine automatically uses the field function to compute membership and to populate it with dynamic content. When I approach the ring, I see asteroids being generated in the exact shape of the ring. It's just awesome
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Mon Jun 23, 2014 5:15 am
#1
Week of June 22, 2014
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford