How can someone spend 3 hours just fine tuning miniscule things on an intro screen?!
I have no idea how, but I know I just did!
First it was disabling the ambient occlusion with the distance (because it gets very noisy, especially with the density of voxels on the intro logo)… Then it was fine tuning times so that the music has more impact… Then it was a small detail on the portal shader… And so on, and so on…
When I looked at the clock, 3 hours had gone by, and the changes are the kind of thing only I really notice…
Anyway, the intro is really done now, and I can move on to another item on my ever-changing list (but never shrinking…)
Now listening to “City of Heroes” by “Kiske/Sommerville”
Link of the Day: This is really impressive realtime graphics… Wish I could spend a lot of time just playing around with this sort of thing… Should have gone into R&D! 
After a lot of tweaking, I got the intro sequence working properly:
It isn’t exactly what I wanted, because the Spellcaster Studios theme is only 18 seconds long, and what I initially had something slower in mind… But I think it conveys the point I was trying to make: voxels and small soldier-like thing walking!
Now listening to “The Diary” by “The Gentle Storm”
Link of the Day: I laughed very hard at this (well, and most of their videos are very funny as well):
Spellcaster Studios has a tradition of sorts: our logo introduction is slightly different in each game… For this one, I wanted to have the logo to go voxelized, so I built a system in which a voxel map is generated from an image, that gets treated as a heightmap…
This was quite fast to implement, thankfully:
Then, getting this into the game was a bit harder… I screwed up a piece of code, so I was adding an unlimited number of lights, which would cause the shader compiler to fail silently (don’t know exactly why), and the rendering would just flicker all over the place… It was weird and it took me forever to figure out…
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll finish this up, hopefully and move onto the game over sequence (still have the code from the Chrome Hunter game).
Now listening to “Blood Alliance” by “Power Quest”
Link of the Day: This looks like a great idea for a game, if a bit too frenetic for my old-man reflexes:
Today I finished the merge of the flow…
First I had to deal with a bug:
This only happened with the OpenGL renderer… Ended up being quite simple, was just looking in the wrong place! I theorized the problem was with the generation of the flow map, since it was the only thing I changed lately… Ended up not being that at all, but the way the emissive color got modulated with the texture color!
After this I just made the flow map merging work on all maps, and fixed a couple of small bugs in the caves as well… So, next step is heightmap import…
Now listening to “Irrational Anthems” by “Skyclad”
Link of the Day: Allegedly, the first 1-bit HD game ever… It looks pretty cool!
Finished merging the custom flows of content coming from the editor with the generated flows on the map…
It seems to be working fine, although I still have to test in planets that don’t have any “source flow”…
Going to finish that part tomorrow, so I can add heightmap import on editor (which was the whole reason I started making all of this “Editor Round”)…
Now listening to “The Alliance of the Kings” by “Ancient Bards”
Not much time for game development today, but still I started work on the merge of the flow maps…
So now the editor-created content can have a flow map, and this flow map should be merged with one that is generated from rivers, lakes, etc…
It’s a bit weird getting this to work, because the system wasn’t built accounting for this, so I have two options: refactor or hack it… Decided to hack, since I’m refactoring would introduce yet more bugs and I’m tired of it… 
Currently, merge is not working, for a reason I really can’t see it (the map is there, and it’s merged properly), so I’m still working on it…
Now listening to “The Complex” by “Blue Man Group”
Got most of the bugs sorted… the black spots were caused by a bad multiplication on the shaders when they didn’t have diffuse lighting, and the offset of the flow map was wrongly computed… Now everything’s working as it should:
Still have a small issue with loading the flow map from the hard drive, but that’s probably something minor, and then I can start the “fun” part, which is to get these maps with flow onto the game itself… that will be terrible, I’m sure…
I also added another way to compute the flow map, which takes in account places where the water/lava will probably flow, and the results are quite acceptable!
The algorithm just finds places where you have a vertical drop, and for all points in the flow map, it searches the closest of these points (that’s lower than the current point) and directs the flow that way… Then, for all the untouched points, I do the reverse, but instead of making the flow go towards that point, I direct the flow away from those points…
Now listening to “Ki” by “Devin Townsend”
Started the day testing the flow map:
Need to make it more sophisticated to handle all cases (not just the test ones), but it’s a step in the right direction…
Then, to start work on that, I loaded up a temple:
A lot of problems here: the black spots (where there’s only emissive color on the voxels, probably an error on a shader somewhere), and the lack of eyes on the status (should be alpha-blended tiles)…
After a lot of work, testing, debugging, etc, etc, I finally figured out that I had alpha-testing enabled for those tiles, by accident, with a very high value for the reference value… This was tricky to figure out mainly because I was looking at the wrong thing: I thought the problem was with the material channels on the voxel map, because the material settings on Pix seemed to be right… but they weren’t, was just looking at the device-level alpha test, and not the shader level alpha-test… :\
Now, I need to check the black spots and then build the code to generate an acceptable flow map automatically…
Now listening to “Soundtrack for the Voices in my Head” by “Celldweller”
Link of the Day: This is such a good parody video, and for a good cause as well!
Still working on getting the lava and water flow to be automatically generated on the editor…
Had huge problems getting the UV mappings to work properly:
In case you’re thinking “what am I looking at?”, you’re looking at something finally working… All water should be black and the edges should go to yellow…
Now I need to compute the water flow itself… This will be complicated, but basically I’m going to use the edges are “repulsors” (like I do on the swamp), but also try to account for differences in height to generate pseudo flows…
Then I’ll have to combine this with the existing flow maps… If this is part of a map, it must combine in a different way from when it is a single map… And then there’s the multi-height issues and the multiple lava/water type (they use the same flow texture)…
So a lot of work to make this work properly… :\
Now listening to “The Congregation” by “Leprous”
Link of the Day: This looks super-sweet, a FTL-like game that fixes most of my issues with FTL (and has much more stuff in it!):
Found some more bugs on the editor… First I fixed the alphas (easy enough):
After, I had to fix the “glue” system… After the revamp of the raycasting system, apparently I screwed up the one on the editor, so I had to go in and fix it… Was a bit of work, but I got it working (and faster than before):
Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be able to make the lava and water effects work properly on the editor, although there’s a lot of work to be done there!
Now listening to “Momentum EP” by “Seamless”
