The General Babblings of Chris Wild
I just thought I’d post a progress report, because it probably seems like I’ve been sat on my arse doing nothing – which on the whole, is probably true.
One of the main goals with The Midnight Engine, was its openness… this is part of the holy grail of all game development, the data driven engine (DDE); in this case I actually think it’s particularly important.
I got the mist from Jure today, so here it is in all it’s glory. I’ve tried to get a few variant shots but the location that mist is in at the beginning isn’t great – and I have no night button working at the moment! The first shot is the opening screen, you will notice compared to the same screenshot posted the other day, the old mist has gone from the bottom right of the terrain, and the new improved one is in place. The other shots show off the mist more dramatically. I also managed to do some work on that bottom left panel for nootropic supplements, not to mention fixing a few UI bugs.
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I am going to try and get this project going by blogging about it. I’m going to tell you want I am up to, and what I achieve a little bit at a time. And hopefully that will keep me building the project, one bit at a time.
Anyway, in the spirit of that; here is the current situation. |inline
I’m going to post a few blog entries regarding technical issues in the Doomdark’s Revenge frontend for TME and TME itself. I wanted to talk about some of the more interesting things that are going on inside it from my point of view. It will help to give an insight but maybe also fill the void of no product! |inline
As part of the graphics effects for Doomdark’s Revenge, Jure and I implemented a haze effect to the landscaping. The mechanic is simple if a little processor hungry. The landscaping technique draws from back to front using seven definitive distance layers, z axis if you like. So what we do in DDR is after every layer has been drawn, we apply a haze alpha mask to modify the pixels drawn. The layer at the back will get modified by every haze layer and thus thicken up the haze fogginess in the distance. You can see the affect on the image here – click to get a bigger view. This is an example of the amount of extra processing taking place in the DDR frontend. What I would like to see is the system moved to using 3d hardware, this would allow effects like this to be done using pixel shaders. This combined with hardware drawing in general would make the DDR frontend function with little graphic overhead.
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