I finally put the finishing touches on the current version of the render engine for my game this week, so I can hopefully hide it away and forget about it for at least a few months now! Optimizations and improving particle effects were on the menu this week, so check out my dev log video below to see how I got on. Alternatively you can read more about the updates below the video. Enjoy!
New Features:
- Atmospheric Particles: Rain, snow and random floaty glowing things! I put the particle engine to good use by allowing different areas in the world to have different atmospheric particle systems, which are particle systems that follow the camera around, giving the impression that the particles are being emitted everywhere.
- Particle Targets: These are points in space that attract or repel particles like a magnet, allowing for some pretty awesome effects. They can be placed anywhere in relation to the particle systems origin. Check out the video to see them in action!
- Objects Fading In and Out of View: Small objects such as grass and flowers have always been limited to only render within a certain radius of the camera. This always caused some nasty visual artifacts as they snapped in and out of view when you were on the move. This week I smoothed out this progression by allowing these objects to fade slowly in and out of view.
- Instanced Rendering: I also implemented instanced rendering for the "clutter" entities, such as grass and flowers, that are often rendered many times in a scene. This helped to optimize and speed up the rendering process.
- Facebook Page: I made a Facebook page, go check it out!
- Looking Forwards: Now that I've finished the render engine (for now!) I'm going to be moving on to creating some development tools for my game. Over the next couple of months I'll be creating an item editor, NPC editor, world editor and many other tools that I will be distributing to anyone who wants to help contribute content for my game. Make sure to get in touch if you want to help!
