Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
This week we introduced various features that were still missing in the new renderer. This includes our blood effects for characters, weapons and sprays, various blending and animated emission effects, hair shading, and a few other things. We also just got everything up and running properly, so we have a seemingly stable playable build.
We didn't have any specific shading for hair in the new renderer, which is difficult to get right as it reflects light in quite a unique way and to the trained human eye very easily looks flat, plasticky or metallic. In the end we developed a very fancy shader with multi-chromatic anisotropic highlights and reflections, some back-scattering and a few other tricks. We also made the hair of undead look patchy and aged.
A lot of what we've been doing is just updating our materials to take advantage of the new renderer and also some assets where we felt they needed more polish. We've put the new tilesets in and are just going through stuff and doing final tweaks. With the the new renderer being largely programmable in real time we couldn't resist experimenting a bit, and we made some really nice improvements here and there, particularly for displacement mapping which now looks more 3D and includes some shadowing and GI occlusion effect.
We are still working on our outdoor GI solution, most of the work is done, but we're still experimenting with some aspects of it. As this is only used for a couple of arenas at the moment we might just disable those while we run the first beta test, as everything else should be ready now.
We also made some improvements to motion, the physics and graphics synch more accurately which makes motion even smoother and reduces perceived input lag. We also fixed some camera jitter which had been annoying us for a long time.
There's some minor things to do to get everything packaged up in a release build, but we're basically there. We should be able to finish updating key assets and polishing things up during the early testing, which hopefully won't last more than a week or so.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
This week we introduced various features that were still missing in the new renderer. This includes our blood effects for characters, weapons and sprays, various blending and animated emission effects, hair shading, and a few other things. We also just got everything up and running properly, so we have a seemingly stable playable build.
We didn't have any specific shading for hair in the new renderer, which is difficult to get right as it reflects light in quite a unique way and to the trained human eye very easily looks flat, plasticky or metallic. In the end we developed a very fancy shader with multi-chromatic anisotropic highlights and reflections, some back-scattering and a few other tricks. We also made the hair of undead look patchy and aged.
A lot of what we've been doing is just updating our materials to take advantage of the new renderer and also some assets where we felt they needed more polish. We've put the new tilesets in and are just going through stuff and doing final tweaks. With the the new renderer being largely programmable in real time we couldn't resist experimenting a bit, and we made some really nice improvements here and there, particularly for displacement mapping which now looks more 3D and includes some shadowing and GI occlusion effect.
We are still working on our outdoor GI solution, most of the work is done, but we're still experimenting with some aspects of it. As this is only used for a couple of arenas at the moment we might just disable those while we run the first beta test, as everything else should be ready now.
We also made some improvements to motion, the physics and graphics synch more accurately which makes motion even smoother and reduces perceived input lag. We also fixed some camera jitter which had been annoying us for a long time.
There's some minor things to do to get everything packaged up in a release build, but we're basically there. We should be able to finish updating key assets and polishing things up during the early testing, which hopefully won't last more than a week or so.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
