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A couple questions from a fellow dev

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Hey there

First of all, let me say how immensely impressed I am with what I've seen in your video logs. Everything from the procedural generation to visual tricks to the UI design leaves a huge grin on my face every time a new devlog comes out. Also huge respect for writing your own engine and tackling all that by yourself. Been there, cursed at that.

Out of sheer curiousity I got a couple random questions, because a) I do encounter similar design dilemmas in a game I write in my free time b) I was dumb enough to somehow completely miss your kickstarter campaign and the prototype.

Is the LT renderer deferred? I saw you've been implementing dynamic lights lately and just wondering, because a fully deferred pipeline would probably be perfect for a game with lots of light sources (projectiles, for example) flying around.

The dust clouds, are they post-processed in now? I have investigated the techniques for doing something like that in the past but never really came up with a solution that wouldn't be a performance hog. More often than not I would handle those with a mesh and a pretty standard fog shader, obscuring the view based on scene depth when the camera is inside the mesh and just showing the mesh's backfaces with some fresnel transparency to appear as a kind of a dust blob from a distance. I presume your solution is much more sophisticated (post-processed fog with roughly raytraced transparency based on a 3d noise map?) but is it fast enough to not burn up an average GPU?

The crosshair-to-ship-orientation input, I can't quite figure it out from the vids - does it work by pitching/yawing the camera when the crosshair is beyond some deadzone from the center of the screen and keeps rotation till you move the cursor back near the middle? And the ship just follows the camera orientation or a vector from camera to some raycasted location under the crosshair? This is a design choice I've been facing every now and then and currently just settled for a more FPS-like solution of the crosshair being always in the center and the ship just orienting towards the location the crosshair points at.

Just curious here, If you think answering any of those questions would disclose your trade secrets, ignore me :)

Cheers!
Mikolaj 'farseer' Jarzina
Coder \ VFX designer at Angels Fall First

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