Hello my dear Rogues!
In this news I want to show you the progress I made with the "Rogue Engine Editor" - an editor I make exclusively for Caasi's Odyssey! With this editor you will create the Rogue Adventure of your dreams. At least it will enable 100% mod support for Caasi's Odyssey!
But let's start with a small video which summarizes the progress. Have fun and enjoy the trip! :)
Let it Bloom
The latest and biggest additions to the Rogue Engine Editor are a high quality bloom filter and a color correction / color grading filter. Together they can reveal very beautiful scenes or rather dungeons.
These nice shaders are fully integrated into the engine, which means that you have multiple ways of manipulating the final scene. You can play around with the global ambient light of the lighting system for example, or the light settings of each individual light. You can also influence the look of the dungeon by adjusting directly the bloom properties like threshold, strength and streak length (pre built-in presets are available too!). Last but not least you can add a color grading filter by using a so called "Look Up Table" or short: "LUT".
Take a look at these samples, which are showing different set-ups to achieve different moods:
If you want to create a darker more vibrant dungeon you could use this set-up:
If you want to globally shift the colors of the final scene you can also use a LUT and setup the environment accordingly:
When you now just change the texture of the light and some properties, the result will be this:
As you can see: manipulating the dungeons with the Rogue Engine Editor is simple and fast. Espacially because you can see the results directly inside the editor without leaving it. All updates are happening in real time!
Color Grading and LUTs
The color grading (or color correction) technique is a post processing effect. By using a so called "Look Up Table" or short "LUT" it's possible to change the brightness, contrast, saturation and much more. You can even shift colors as you saw in the examples above to create a variation of moods for the dungeons pretty fast.
There are currently 12 LUTs built-in in the editor. Later it will be possible to add your own custom LUTs and use them inside the editor.
Building a custom LUT is fairly easy, because you just need to take out the default LUT (in the picture above it's the one on the upper left corner) and paste it on a screenshot which shows your modification or the default dungeon scene and then change the colors of this screenshot to whatever you like with your favourite image manipulation application (like Photoshop) - the LUT updates accordingly. When you are done, then you are just extracting the new LUT and importing them to the editor. Now you can use the new LUT inside the editor like every other one. Yeah, it's really that easy!
Steam API
As you may saw in the video, I already integrated the steam api into the editor. It currently does some basic things like displaying the steam user name in the output log and in the status bar (inclusive potentially emojies ;))
But it's just a basic step as a preperation for the steam release. Later I will use the steam api mainly to add a Steam Workshop integration, so it becomes ultra easy for everyone to share their creations. This will be the final step to create a mod friendly environment and community.
What's Next?
I'm currently working on general mod management for the editor, so it becomes possible to load and edit multiple projects. I will give you more insight in the next news. Be prepared and buy popcorn! :)
Create the Rogue Adventure of your dreams!
See you in the next news!
I hope you enjoyed this update. Don't forget to follow me here on IndieDB!
I also wish you a very nice weekend!
