《Drifting : Weight of Feathers》is a third-person shooter-action game. The combat system revolves around air-to-ground, air-to-air shooting and traversing. Each encounter in the game challenges the player to develop a situational awareness in 3D space, which includes constantly prioritizing your target whilst observing the surroundings to find out the key to advance to the next stage.
Scenery in 《Drifting : Weight of Feathers》
Steam - Store.steampowered.com
Itch.IO - Rit2040.itch.io
IndieDB - Indiedb.com
UE4 Forum - Forums.unrealengine.com
Light Shaft
Hello everyone!
In order to achieve a visual aesthetic with low-performance hit, I adopt the practice of using translucent cone or plane mesh to simulate light shaft.
While the result looks great and the shader complexity is low, I've noticed there's always a harsh cut-off at the edge of each mesh - the rays stopped abruptly where the mesh ended - I need to manually hide these meshes under floors or behind walls to avoid breaking the illusion. I've tried using a gradient texture to smooth out the edges, but the cut-off is still noticeable, and tweaking the strength of the gradient affects the brightness of the light shaft meaning extra work to re-calibrate all the previously made light shaft.
Curious how other developers made their light shaft without harsh cut-off, I made a search online and found a 2015 post - Forums.unrealengine.com in the UE4 community forum. The author demonstrated a beautiful light shaft without a visible cut-off at the edge of the plane. I took a closer look at the shader graph, although the shader is similar to mine, the author uses an ellipse-shaped gradient texture instead of a plain gradient texture. I replaced my gradient texture with the ellipse-shaped one and, surprisingly, all the harsh cut off vanishes!
Here is a BIG THANK YOU to @Rhayader for his wonderful texture and generosity to share it with other developers! ヽ(°▽、°)ﾉ
Feel free to share your tips and tricks to make the light shaft even better! I hope you enjoy this week's update, have a lovely weekend peko!