It's been awhile since the last update, but we've been hard at work adding several new features to the game. We recently accepted Feengur (Chad) to the team as a particle effects programmer, and already he has integrated good looking rain and snow effects into the engine.
Some Images of Rain and Snow
Additionally, I implemented screen space decals, which allow dynamically adding and changing effects, such as snow accumulation and the illusion of objects getting wet. These decals have normal and specular attenuation factors, which make sure that snow doesn't accumulate on vertical surfaces, and rain doesn't make specular (shiny / metal) objects look wet.
Also, for those of you who haven't seen the recent images added to our gallery, I posted some small updates to mountain textures and lines. The first change to add a procedural texture index map to the mountains, which chooses from and blends between multiple tileable mountain textures. While we wait for tileable textures to be finished, the mountain has plain green, brown, light gray, dark gray and white color textures applied based on this texture map, representing grass, dirt, rock1, rock2 and snow textures respectively.
Anti-aliasing and some tweaks were also added to the lines. The lines are now soft-lines, meaning that the closer to geometry they are, the lighter they become (unless they were marked as lines). This causes the lines to blend into the geometry, rather than cause clipping artifacts; overall, anti-aliasing helps clean things up, and gives another artistic touch to the game. Below are before and after anti-aliasing screenshots. Anti-aliasing is only added to lines, but since there are lines on all edges, it helps anti-alias the entire scene.
That's all for this update. However, in our next post, we’ll reveal some of the details of what to expect in the single player campaigns, specifically with a glimpse into their main characters. For now, we’ll just let you look at some preliminary art:
Look forward to future updates!
Lead Programmer and Designer of Aero Empire
- David
Nice job! keep it up. The Snow and Rain seem well done.
Nice news item, just keep it up like that and we'll have an amazing game!
Really great work
Nice shadowplay! What would really be rad in any game is if the snow would actually pile up slowly and eventually become slippery ice.
The snow does accumulate right now as a decal texture (the whiteness on the building and mountaintop). There's not a lot of ground movement in this game, so I don't know how useful having slippery ice would be, but it could be interesting. When you mean pile up, do you mean have actual 3D structure to it instead of just a texture?
you know, that could be something really interesting for the game... and yeah, it's quite unseen...
Nice snow effect, I also like how the terrain gets a nice cell shaded effect at the steep angles. Excellent work!
This game looks beautiful