Camera Angles For Roguelike-likes: Discuss.

Nothing new this time, save that the magical technology of alpha testing is sort-of working. Hence ugly water-lily pads in the picture. I cannot for the life of me get them to render shadows properly, to the point where I'm wondering if my hardware just doesn't do alpha testing when rendering to f32 render targets. Regardless, I quite liked this shot and it fits what I've been thinking.

I spent a few hours this weekend tweaking and adding stuff, and one of the conclusions I'm coming to is that the top-down view so endemic to roguelikes just doesn't show off a lot of the sparkly shininess. That, and it is really hard to design meshes for. Most things look like rocks from that angle, and I don't have the talent to avoid this.

As I've also been blowing the dead spiders off the gameplay code, I figure it might be worth investigating a few options. Third-person RL could work, if changing view direction is free or low-cost compared to moving (the latter could make for a very interesting game, I feel, if the same restricted field of view is applied to enemies).

First person solves a few problems with cameras hitting walls, but I don't think it'd work very well with movement restricted to tiles.

An angled view in line with ye olde isometric games or, say, Torchlight's camera can also work well. Need a good solution for game objects being behind walls though, especially monsters.

Of these, third-person seems like it could be the most interesting from a gameplay point of view, and the last option feels like a safe fallback if that can't be made to work. So, I shall be trying these things out!

Water! Again!

I've been off discovering the joys of Bitbucket, but after some friendly discussion of various crazy rendering schemes I decided to do a litle shader work with respect to water rendering. The spare channels of the blur mask render target now store distortion and detail values, which are applied during the blur pass to add a bit more detail back into the freshly-blurred areas.

Looking a bit better than it was, I think, especially when the water is moving.



Yeah, the distortion values have a definite tendency to smear downwards, which is very visible in the image taken from a low camera angle. I'll work on that. Still, it's nice to have lit water that doesn't look too smeary.

Flanges With Everything

Can't say I like the turquoise colour, but it'll do for the moment. Refraction and depth blending seem to work acceptably well, and the water is not too bad looking in motion. Still pondering the best way to integrate the dynamic lights.

I reworked the way texture types are distributed over the cavern, so it biases the moss (purple!) around the water with the 'shrooms. Said shrooms are currently not placed exactly on the ground, instead they use the average height for a tile and therefore tend to float a bit, which when you have shadows and the right lighting angle becomes painfully obvious.

It can't be seen in this pic, but there's also support for emissive maps now. The mushrooms have tiny glowing spots which will be re-worked into larger glowing spots for a future screenshot. Unfortunately the addition of the emissive data to the pipeline has gobbled up most of my last free render target... all further information will have to be crammed into the three spare alpha channels. I'm guessing either a specular channel and material indices or a handful of miscellaneous BRDF parameters will eat those.

My hope is to do some content generation this weekend, but I strongly suspect it'll disappear into less fruitful activities. Still, you never know!

By the way, anyone know of a good (preferably open source) alternative to the GIMP? Its support for working with images using the alpha channel in any non-trivial way is frankly terrible.

Splish... splish...

Hey, WoW hasn't consumed my soul entirely! Or maybe it's just not finished digesting it.

Or possibly a darker entity already laid claim on it, in exchange for a Mars bar and some ruled paper in an unholy pact outside a lecture theatre many, many years ago.

Anyway, li'l update. I added water tiles and subsequently a crappy water shader (it can and will be much better... no refraction, no depth-based fog, no falloff in the shallows, no influence from the deferred lights, no dynamic interactions... the list of things currently missing goes on).

I also added a rock, and changed the previous mushroom mesh to look a bit less rock-like, and spent some time tidying up a few bits of code that just couldn't be ignored any longer. Experimented a bit with different distributions for the instanced clutter - mushrooms are now more likely to occur near water, and rocks tend to be scattered around natural walls.