Sunday, July 6, 2014
Bit of a slow Sunday unfortunately, as I couldn't seem to get in the zone today. Perhaps because I got distracted by flying around the LT universe I honestly haven't seen too many systems ever since the implementation of that color grading shader and...wow...I was kind of mesmerized as I jumped from system to system, seeing a lot of beauty that I've not seen before Ah, proceduralism. How I love you
Playability: Wormhole Zones
As if we hadn't already gotten enough mileage out of the recent zone tech, today I decided to go ahead and use it for one more thing. Since the beginning of LT, I've been using collision detection to initiate wormhole jumps (i.e., I would just fly right into the thing). Having used this system for over a year, I'm now comfortably able to say that I strongly prefer Freelancer's way of doing it: approach the wormhole and press a key to use it.
Today I added a zone component to wormholes and implemented some logic to provide a 'press X to use wormhole' message just like the 'press X to dock with Y' message. I stripped the collision component out of wormholes as well, since they'll no longer need to pay attention to collisions. I'm already enjoying this more relaxed and intentional way of moving between systems, and have spent a good bit of time exploring today
I still need to implement wormhole animations - but those should tie in nicely with warp tunnel graphics, which I started last month. If I could get that finished soon, we might finally see a dev video that shows more than one system again!
Imposter Tech
I gave a few more hours today to the imposters / zone LOD tech that I mentioned yesterday. I'm now able to generate texture atlases that contain renders of a given entity at a number of different angles. Now I just need to write a shader that interpolates between them based on the camera angle, and we should be in good shape to see some basic, working imposters!
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Getting back in the zone tomorrow - guaranteed!
Post
Mon Jul 07, 2014 11:41 am
#1
Week of July 6, 2014
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford