Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: June 2015

More bug fixing!

As the title indicates, today was mostly dedicated to bug fixing… It was mostly small visual glitches I introduced in the last couple of big changes (GLFW integration, AABB culling), and they were mostly annoying to me… The worst was solving a bug with the occlusion system, but that ended up just being a simple […]

Welcome detour

Had a welcome detour today… My artist finally finished the diagonal movements of the main player, so I had to see how that looked… Before, I had only the 4 major directions, which translated in something like this: Now, the sprite has eight directions! It looks much better! This required me to add a new […]

GLFW and input

Today I managed to finish the input rewrite to use GLFW with the OpenGL renderer… Got to admit that it went rather well, all things considering… It’s a bit “hacked”, and I might work it over again at a later stage (to make it more efficient, less DirectInput-like, since there’s no actual need). Not noticeable […]

Never according to plan…

As I said yesterday, I’m currently using GLFW to help me in the future to port the game from Windows to Linux and Mac… Of course, nothing goes according to plan… Problem number 1: I thought I could use GLFW to handle all the window/keyboard/mouse events, both in OpenGL and DirectX, but that is not […]

OpenGL device enumeration

“How do I get the available resolutions in OpenGL?” This seems like a simple question, but it’s not! While on Direct3D, this is part of the API, it seems that it goes in fact straight to the Win32 API and retrieve that… So, OpenGL would have to do the same, and that obviously enough can’t […]

Player occlusion

I wasn’t very happy with the way the camera behaved when the player got occluded by nearby voxels… Sometimes it works nice, but most of the time it’s unsettling from a gameplay perspective… What’s happening is that when the camera is occluded, it will zoom in the player and then zoom out when it’s no […]

Weird…

…this is one of the most often spoken words while doing game development… I was going to start working on a new player occlusion method, since I dislike the current solution (more on this later). I did half the code and ran the game, and I was greeted by this: while running in OpenGL… Switching […]

Frustrating optimizations

Today I added one optimization that was on the list for ages now: camera culling… Before you start shouting at me, there was already some camera culling being performed, mainly on the voxels (which is the biggest hit on the rendering), and I don’t believe in premature optimization… Anyway, since this was on the list, […]

Environmental audio effects

FMod is such a simple and effective API, I couldn’t resist in adding some environmental audio effects… So now, on the caves, there’s a small echo effect, and on asteroid areas, we have some sound filtering, which mutes the high frequencies… It’s a small detail, and I think players would only really notice it if […]

Playtesting…

I hurt myself in the foot yesterday, which means I can’t sit on the desk to code or work on the game (without having the foot in a potential harmful way). So I decided to hang my feet up and try playing the game a bit… The balancing is a bit better than in previous […]