The other day I postet some of the current videos to some folks on different platforms and asked what they think of it and if there are any flaws making the game less interesting.
The answers were pretty obvious. Most of the time people said, the would like more detail on the asteroid itself and it would be of a big benefit if there would be some interaction with all the laser blasts to feel more "inside" of the space battle.
Well - they are right - all of them - so I started to conquer those problems and implement some pretty cool new features which will help to make it better. In this Part I I will talk about
Bump Mapping
While the asteroids are procedural generated it is just not possible to do that in such level of detail I would love to do - it would slow the game down awefully and would not add anything to actual gameplay. So the current asteroids look a bit flat a bit low on detail. Because the engine is mostly self made I just cannot switch on a flag but have to code it myself. To get more detail on the asteroid I opt for Bump Mapping which is meant to give the asteroid more detail.
For an asteroid that means, you may expect a lot of craters and such things and because everything is moving that optic is best maintained by using bump mapping (or normal mapping)
The result worked out great! It just looks greatly improved. I've put up a video to show you how it did look some days ago:
Right in the middle of the video, I am switching off the bump effect for a short period of time so you see the difference.
You will see a lot of texture artifacts and hard egdes in this video - this was fixed in the meantime, but because my upload is sometimes incredibly slow I decided to put a first video of it up as soon as possible - so don't be mad with me, those hard edges and artifacts are already fixed, as you will see in one of the follow up videos :-)
As always I would love to hear your opinions, just leave me a comment!
