If you've been keeping up to date with the game's progress you'll know that I recently overhauled the rendering engine to create a brand new engine that is positively bursting with exciting new features! Over the last week I connected this engine up to the game itself, and went about creating a new world for our little character to run about in. Check out the video below for a quick look at the game's new look! You can also read about all of last week's updates underneath the video. Enjoy!
Latest Updates:
- New world: Rolling hills, colossal mountains, and long winding pathways! The new engine gave me complete freedom to create larger terrain forms, and I took advantage of that this week by creating a much more impressive world than before.
- Lighting improvements: As I mentioned last week, the new engine supports per pixel lighting, whereas I was using only per vertex lighting before. The new lighting system can now be seen in the game, improving the shiny look of the player's armour tenfold!
- Doubled render distance: The new LOD systems in the engine allowed me to push back the render distance to double what it was before, allowing the player to see far off into the distance.
- New day/night cycle: The day/night cycle used to be a bit of a messy cycle, with the colour of the sky and fog at any particular time of the day being calculated by a function of time. That made it pretty hard for me to set the colour of the sky at certain times of the day, so I redid this system completely! The cycle now uses a key-frame approach, which allows me to set specific colours for specific times of day. The system interpolates between these keyframe values to calculate the colour of the sky at any given time.
- Hair: The character in the game is now longer bald, with support for hair being added last week! Hats now have an attribute that specifies whether the hat covers hair completely or not, which means that hair can still be seen under small hats, but not rendered at all when larger helmets are worn. This prevents any unwanted clipping occurring. The colour of the hair is customisable, and there is a possibility for many more hairstyles to be added in the future!
- Debugging GUI: This is just a little update for myself, to help me with the development process. A little interface now pops up if I press F3, giving me useful information about how the game is running.
- Planning the map: I've started giving some thought to designing and creating the world in which the game will take place. You can actually find the map of the world (at least a very rough draft of it) in the images section of this game's page. In a month or so I'll start work on a world editor, and then the world can start to be created!
So, now you're totally up to date with all the latest updates from my game! Do check out the video if you haven't already, and I'd love to hear your feedback, criticism, or general comments about this week's updates. Next week, skyboxes!
The title got my attention because it shares a name with a Disney song, but map looks cool so far bro, good luck with the rest!