Development Blog #16 - Bobbing movement, better bump maps and castle news

Hello and welcome back!

In the last we week we mostly worked on the HDR system:

HDR

We created the basic architecture of the HDR system. We will implement several different types of pipelines:

• Basic HDR, no glare
• HDR, with simple glare
• HDR, with glare, star effect
• HDR, with glare, star effect and depth of field

Of course every pipeline can be adjusted to the performance of your indiviual computer.

The engine is now abled to use a floating point buffer and supports HDR lights. In fact the only thing what is still missing is the tone mapping algorithm. This will reduce an HDR image to a low dynamic range so that it can be displayed on the screen. This algorithm will also simulate the light adaption of the human eye. But of course at a much faster rate. It would not be practial to wait 20 minutes for the virtual eye to adapt to the light strengths in caves!

Bear

When the HDR system is finish we plan to update the whole enemy system. This was also the reason why we updated the model imported. And we created a bear:

Bobbing settings

A player had the idea that we should implement a bobbing movement when the player moves. This has been done. Check out the video:

And you can also see that we made a castle for testing purposes:

We will add more stuff to the interior.

Glass

As mention the next unstable release will feature glass. Here are some screenshot of the glass in action:

Improved bump maps

Along with the parallax occlusion mapping algorithm we also updated the bump mapping algorithm.

This nearly looks as parallax occlusion mapping was used but it isn't. This means the game will look better even if you only own an old computer.

iOS & Linux pipeline

Both pipelines are completed now. We created release versions for both platforms. We also configured Steam for the deployment. We are currently doing a lot of testing. Especially the settings dialog makes still problems.