Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Multithreading

Today I started tackling one of the big optimizations: multithreaded area generation and management… Multithreaded code is always hard, since it demands a lot of care on how to build stuff, and since graphic APIs don’t like working multithreaded (at least D3D9 doesn’t), I need to work around that limitation as well… So started with […]

AI state and more bugs

Today was mostly a bug-tracking day, with some polish to help me on this… First thing I added was a display for the AI state… Now, when the player gets spotted by the enemies, it will get a visual queue… if the enemy loses the player, it will show the change again, etc… Considering the […]

Water splash and bug fixing

Today I added some more water effects, namely the “waves” when you walk in the water and the splash when you get in: It’s not very good, but I think it works… Also added an effect for when lightning hits the water, instead of just leaving a scorch mark: Then I had some bugs to […]

Argh, more precision bugs!

The days started great… Added the “grass” shader to OpenGL, and added the option to hide the UI (great for screenshots), and was adding something pretty cool: water splashes when the player jumps or falls into water. In the process, I found another silly precision bug (that of course, manifests if I switch renderers): when […]

More grass

Worked a bit more on grass today… In the process I found a silly bug with the terrain generation: The water over there should have a barrier making a basin… The reason for this was that the terrain around it was marked as “static” (because it’s rock), but it shouldn’t in this case… The result […]

Grass

Working on grass for the alien planet… Results are absolutely terrible! First I tried putting in grass in a triangular pattern, so you could look at it from any angle (for cutscenes, mainly)… The first problem shows up… The normal of one or two prongs will always be extra dark, which will cause the ugliness […]

Alien planet polish

Started the polishing of the alien planet… This is the initial state: Very barren, looks artificial,etc… Started by the usual places: getting the water flow/rivers working, improving the terrain generation… My focus was really off today, so this went way slower than it should… Then I added crystals to the landscape, which helps with the […]

No much time…

Not much time for work today (just wrote one sentence in the game!), so here’s something to keep you busy: a GIF with all the screenshots I took of the game so far! Now listening to “The Varangian Way” by “Turisas”

More bugs down!

Today was mostly a bug-hunting day, but I had time to do other stuff… First things first, I removed one of the big bugs in the game: a raycast issue that would sometimes cause the game to freeze… This was very hard to detect, but after I found a way to replicate it consistently, it […]

That was quick…

Finished the polish of the swamp level… Quite impressive, to be honest, since I was expecting it to take more or less the same time as the previous ones… Added a rain effect, which worked great! And then, for good measure, added some droplets in the water, to simulate the splash, using some decals: The […]