Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

For my project, I've been working on a kind of 80s style sci-fi monitor display.In game, this is going to be handled by a single texture effect with a GLSL shader. Different sections of the texture will be cut down and used on different view screens. Here's a preview of how it looks in action: Screen capture in Linux Mint is always a bit buggy. :( Or maybe it's because my computer is over ten years old... Here's another set of screens with different colors and contents, for the planet that the player gets to visit in the first episode (you can see in this preview how the "alert effect" is activated to change colors of the scan): You can see the original effect I'm trying to duplicate in the Star Trek movies: Anyway, it's a nice set of old school effects, and I'm going to explain how they are achieved in a game engine with a GLSL shader (In this case, GODOT, and awesome free game engine). First you need to set up the different layers of your image. ...

There are still some thing to add to the terrain set, but its mostly finished for now. It's really great to have a fully featured level editor so that the map elements can be tested right away. No messing around with modifying text files or external programs. Just switch modes and paint. The terrain has achieved the appearance I aimed for, which is similar to a table top gaming board. I never wanted a photo real game environment, and I'm happy with the way it has turned out. It reminds me of bonsai trees or miniature gardens. It is quite obviously tile based, there's no getting around that, but it's important in any case, since otherwise it could be difficult to know where units can move or not as well as guessing lines of sight. Most of the techniques I've used here are things I tried before, but I never got them looking so nice or running so well. Drain on the graphics card is negligible at this point. The shader works really well. The movement shader ...

Most of the AI and mission structure is done. It still needs heavy testing, but I'm getting tired of looking at the placeholder terrain, so I'm doing some work on the full terrain. This is the basic "summer" terrain. There's a lot still to add, such as the water part of the shader (where you can see the grey gravel in the above shot) and of course trees, bridges and walls. I'm not sure yet if I want to add modular roads as a different object. That would give them a more solid appearance, but might take more work and be more of a drain on resources. There will be other terrain sets as well, some will feature bigger rocks, and different kinds of trees.

I was watching one of my son's cartoons today and I noticed they models were using serious amounts of simulated rim lighting . Even though it wasn't a dark scene where you'd usually see such an effect, the result was actually quite effective. The white edge highlighting and ambient occluded creases give a kind of high contrast that is similar to, but different from traditional comic book ink work. I'll be honest, I don't know if there's a specific term for this effect in 3d design, since my major at university was in traditional art. I learned it as part of photography. You can find plenty of tutorials on "what is rim lighting" for photography. It basically means putting your main sources of light behind your subject so that they are lit around the edges. It can produce very arresting photographs, either with an obvious effect when used on a dark subject ... ..,or as part of a fully lit scene to add some subtle highlights. See ho...