Wednesday, March 8, 2017
My oh my, what a week. It started out unimpressively, but after a few days I got my act together and turned out some very serious work. Today it culminated in the completion of my final goals from last week, and a fun little photo shoot Since I finally am able to come bearing shinies, I will do a bit less talking this time and a bit more showing!
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I said last week that I'd be a happy camper if I had my primary assets 100% back, and I'm pleased to say that I am indeed a happy camper!
BoxMeshes: 110%. (PlateMeshes were renamed to the slightly-less-flashy but more-appropriate 'BoxMesh,' since that's really what they are). Rotation was implemented. An extra 10% is credited to the additional functionality of per-axis bevel control, rather than a single bevel value for each box, which makes the LT Core's BoxMeshes even more expressive than those of LTC++. The elements of a BoxMesh can now take on cylindrical and other anisotropic shapes that weren't possible previously, lending more options to the ship & station algorithms.
Scalar Fields / Distance Fields / Surface Extraction: 125%. In addition to a higher-quality implementation than existed previously, the underlying algorithm has changed from marching cubes to surface nets, which is both more elegant and yields nicer mesh quality. Not only were fields implemented in their own right, but 3D textures were implemented at the LT core level with more features than previously, including facilities to easily generate 3D textures from shader output as well as to convert said textures into scalar fields in a single handy function. I had quite some fun playing with fields this week thanks to this functionality. Generating asteroid geometry on the GPU requires perhaps 20 lines of Lua and about 15 lines of GLSL (most of which is just #include and uniform declarations).
Mesh Occlusion & Warps: 100%. All kinks in the occlusion computation are fixed. Mesh warps (spatial distortions) are now implemented and can be used to (efficiently) apply a wide variety of distortions to meshes with a single line of Lua. I also implemented parallel warps (i.e., applied at the same time rather than taking into account previous warps; not to mean parallel in the thread or SIMD sense) in a compact and efficient way, much nicer than the old. Warps are the first construct in the LT core to make use of the epiphany I had last week concerning how to make reference counting work easily in a C library, even across the API boundary (i.e., behaving correctly with the LuaJIT GC). It's stupidly-simple and I should have thought of it ages ago.
Porting of PCG Algorithms for Asteroids, Ships, and Stations: 100%. Seeing the ship and station algorithms again reminds me that I do need to put some more time into them, but it's refreshing nonetheless to have them back!
Now for some show-not-tell! Note that there's a tiny bit of cheating going on in these screenshots: I rendered them at 4x supersampling since I didn't port SMAA yet and wanted high-quality, non-jaggy shots. The FPS is rather low even on my new laptop, but that's only due to supersampling (I'm drawing 16x more pixels than needed). At normal resolution (1080p) the framerate is, of course, excessively smooth Second note: object surfaces (metal, rock) do not look quite the same / quite as good as in the old shots due to the fact that the deferred lighting pipeline is not back (not a huge deal, just requires me to spend some time with shaders). Graphics details weren't the priority here; getting assets back in play was!
I took a lot of screenshots. It was fun and I know you guys have been hungry for some, so you can view the full album here. I hope I'm not giving away too much candy, you still have to enjoy future shots (and visual fidelity will not improve a whole lot from here, other than there being more going on in the shots)!
Favorite ship shots:
Favorite station shots:
Some planets:
Some asteroids:
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That's it for this week. No LTasm work; the asset work was too rewarding. This week I'll be attempting to sprint on gameplay features in the LT Demo (can't really call it PAX demo anymore), since I'll be showing it again on Saturday at LSU's TEDxLSU event. I'm not a speaker, but the tech park was offered some presentation space there, so I'll be on-campus with a few other devs from LTP, doing something similar to what I was doing at PAX. I'd love to bump up the fun factor of the demo and take the opportunity to crunch some good gameplay work at the same time!
And honestly, I think it's worth stressing: REJOICE! This may look like the LT you knew and loved (hopefully), but it's so much more tractable under the hood. It's free of technical debt and anxiety...erm...yes, a codebase can have anxiety. If I gave you guys the LT core and the Lua code I've got right now, you'd be able to make a great space game with it (without having to hire an artist). I've never been able to say that with confidence before. Of course, I'm going to take a shot at making that great space game first before I let you guys in on it, sorry
Time to get sprinting
PS ~ Apparently 8-day weeks are more natural for me. Keep expecting unaligned devlogs
Post
Wed Mar 08, 2017 6:32 pm
#1
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.” ~ Henry Ford