Celaria - The use of custom shaders news

It has been a while since i posted any kind of news on IndieDB regarding Celaria.
The whole porting process from GM 8.1 to GM: Studio was time-consuming and most of my time i had to learn for school (which didn't help the development process either.)

So, now most of Celarias functionality from GM 8.1 was ported over to Studio. I made performance improvements, fixed bugs and added nice graphical effects.

But most of my updates is mostly "behind the scenes" stuff. So i can't show much progress on the graphical side of things. But as i have a ton of spare time and a lt of things are already done (or partially done) behind the scenes, you can expect new updates soon.

Remember the smooth 3D animations from GM 8.1 which i used in Celaria?
GM 8.1 smooth animations

Well, this method used the CPU to calculate the morph-targets. The more 3D animations you have in the scene, the more CPU power is needed. So what do we do in such a situation?
Using the GPU? With the new shader capabilities this should be possible, or not?
The answer is: Yes, we can do it on the GPU.

By using Blender for animating, a custom binary animation format for saving, a converter from .obj to this custom binary format and custom vertex-buffers in combination with a shader, we can caluclate all animations on the GPU. As GPUs can calculate a lot of information simultaneously (not like the CPU where only one vertex can be calculated while the other ones wait in the queue) we have a huge performance increase which allows us to display multiple 3D animations without any problems. I'm aiming at max 64 characters in the scene (for the multiplayer mode) which works flawlessly with this technique.

Now, shaders are also used to enhance the graphical fidelity of the game.
While this effects in the following video are nothing special (especially the specularity on the character) it's still a minor enhancement on the graphical side.

The SSAO in the game is (on a technical level) very similar to the SSAO approach from the game "Crysis". I'm only using the depth-buffer to calculate the SSAO. This approach doesn't really give "realistic" results, but it is a nice visual improvement nontheless.

I also bought the rights to the url "celaria.com". There is currently a temporary website (with practically no content) running on it. I'm working on the final website for the game which should be available in the following weeks.

That's all for today.