Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Grey

Effects in the editor…

We haven’t had much time lately, been too tired after work to be productive. Anyway, we’ve added effect instancing to the editor… It’s still not complete, but although the effects have to be authored “by hand” in XML, we can now create and use them in the editor: That’s the frost bones effect, which is […]

Code regrets… :)

There’s always regrets while coding, specially when we’re talking about a 10+ year codebase (with lots of refactoring, etc)… One of my main mistakes for ages was not to use matrix calculation. Of course, I used matrixes when it was time to deliver things to the graphics card, etc, but other than that, I ran […]

Backend coding…

RealJob™ has been kicking my butt lately, and I’m waiting on the GUI work so I’ll be able to progress more in the development of the game itself; but none of these reasons has stopped me from work! Lately, most of what I’ve been doing is backend system coding, stuff like refactoring the collision/intersection system, […]

Loads of new stuff!

The reason why we’ve been so quiet is that we’ve been working (finally) on the game systems themselves and the gameplay is starting to take shape! First, I finished the “highlight” effect, that kicks in when the mouse cursor is on top of something that can be interacted with: First I tried making a simple […]

Light volumes…

In my test arena, I had some performance issues in same places, where about 9 lights were shinning in a greater or smaller degree… Considering that in a deferred renderer, the main issue is bandwidth (each shaded pixel needs at least 64 bytes of data to come in from texture memory – the G-Buffer), I […]

Starting work on the arena…

The merge tool is finally done, and while it was a truckload of work, it was worth it for the amount of small bugs I found… Nothing was too serious or hard to fix, but most where quite complicated to find and would be hard to fix later! I’m finally finished with all the detours […]

Merge project tool

Sorry about the lack of updates, but the day job was hectic and I had some personal stuff to sort out… Even so, I’ve had time to make another detour in terms of development roadmap and started building a “project merge” tool… Everything we’re doing in Grey is done on the SurgeEd tool, which manages […]

Color grading

Most of the time this week was spent (again) on things that were scheduled for later in the development cycle, either because they’re too useful now (the geometry clusters, the shadow clusters) or because I was curious in seeing the results, like the color grading. From Wikipedia: “Color grading or colour painting, is the process […]