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Olvand is a little multiplayer sandbox RPG, where the players live in self-built towns and can go on all kinds of adventures together. Imagine living with your friends in a small town in the mountains, or creating a new group of friends in a pub in the metropole you all live in. There will be several mini-games the inhabitants of a server can play together, among which will be combat based games like King of the Hill or Capture the Flag. You will be able to play against other people in your city, or as a city against another city, or as a whole server against another server. The combat works with self-built guns, in which all kinds of powers can be combined to create unique effects.

Post news Report RSS A video showing lighting engine Glux, and more about shadows

This week, I finally show you Glux in action. It's not perfect, and I will tell you why, but it's going to be implemented anyway.

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Hi everyone! I've gotten a number of very positive responses to the [new trailer] I released last week, so I've decided to go on with it and try to send it to a few smaller indie news sites. But before I do so, the screenshots shown here on IndieDB/Desura will have to be updated, and the website needs to have a serious update as well. I've already made a start with that, as you can see at [olvand.com]: I've added a FAQ and a videos section, complete with new icons and tooltips.

Glux: current status
And now that I'm showing you finished things and videos, I might as well do that for Glux. The animations and text blocks I talked about last time are now fully implemented and working. On top of that, I reorganized the whole project to make it a bit easier to maintain, and cleaned up some last things, so Glux is now fully ready to be implemented. I have to admit I'm a bit scared to start, as lots and lots of very basic code that has been in the game for years will have to rewritten... wish me luck! And sorry if my next blogpost will be a bit pessimistic because I broke everything and can't get it back to working :P.

However, before I start the implementation, I wanted to give you an idea of what Glux looks like in real time. Here's a video of Glux in action:

There are several things in this video I haven't discussed before - for example, the fact that objects can be lit from the side and have the correct shadows, or the difference between lighting in outdoor and indoor areas. I'll talk about those things later, when I don't have that much progress to share.

What's also in this video, but impossible for the naked eye to see, is that it all works extremely fast (1000+ fps)! I've done several rounds of optimizations, and the results are clearly visible (if you have an fps counter running, that is). I hope it will be as quick when it runs the full game - what you see here is just a mock-up.

Finally, while recording this, I discovered another nice advantage of Glux: with Glux, making Fraps videos is super-easy! With the current version of Olvand, you have to record your whole screen, and then crop so you only see the game window. Glux windows (that is: OpenGL windows), however, can be captured directly by Fraps. No longer those stupid hours and hours of mindless editing, hurray!

An improvement area for Glux
That said, there are also still various areas where Glux can be improved. I'll discuss my biggest concern now: you might have noticed that with the lighting as shown above, something is still not *right*, if you know what I mean. Actually, it is 'not right' to such an extent that it is taking some of the fun out of the game, actually. What am I talking about here? As you may remembers from [my explanation of the workings of shadows in Glux], shadows are drawn on top of the game world... but only on the ground. You can see that here:

Zoom in (real dimensions: 135 x 134)Image

If the shadows had worked like this in real life, the stones indicated with the arrows should have been dark, like this:

Zoom in (real dimensions: 135 x 134)Image

This means that all objects that are close enough to a light will be lit up, no matter whether something is blocking this light or not. So in caves, you can light up things behind walls without actually breaking this wall. That of course makes discovering underground caves a whole lot less mysterious. It is a small disadvantage compared to the many advantages Glux brings, but it is definitely something I want to try to fix later.

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fascka
fascka

i´m waiting for an update to get hooked up again also this looks awesome

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Twillypop
Twillypop

Oh, this will be very eye candy ;]
Keep up the good work!

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