I was tired of my old sky dome, so I replaced it with a single quad with a pixel shader that handles shifting backlit and normal-mapped clouds, ‘god’ rays, and atmospheric scattering. It actually has a lower impact on framerate than the old sky because it is all drawn at the same time.
Henry just got initial multiplayer support working; we can now connect and chat and jump around! There is no fighting yet, but this is a great first step.
Dynamic terrain level of detail is working now using a form of patch-based geomipmapping; this means that we can seamlessly render distant terrain at lower level of detail, so polygon count does not increase exponentially as view distance increases. This means that we can make the far clip plane much farther away while maintaining high framerate, so you will be able to see far into the distance.
There has been a lot of talk in the forum about Lugaru 2 music, so we decided to post a track with excerpts from several of Mikko Tarmia’s fantastic songs. There are several kinds of songs in Lugaru 2, and they will play based on the current situation and Turner’s emotional state.
Morph targets allow us to create several model variations and interpolate between them, so that we keep all of the benefits of skeletal animation as well as the flexibility of traditional keyframe animation. This allows our characters to blink, breathe, make facial expressions, and other soft motion that would be difficult to simulate using bones.
Here is an example of interpolation between two morph targets (artwork by Ian Wells):
I just got normal mapping (with or without specular lighting) integrated into the game engine properly, so we can render detailed bumpy surfaces such as wrinkles in cloth or ornate carvings. We are making sure to keep the normal mapping toned down and realistic, so we can avoid the shiny-plastic look plaguing many recent games.
I basically applied the grass shader to Turner, and this is what he looks like! I am going to have to tweak it a lot to make it look more like fur (anisotropic lighting, edge highlighting, etc)
I thought the grassy areas were looking a little bit flat, so I started working on the grass rendering. It uses the same general principle as the old grass system (fin/shell volume rendering) but now it uses vertex and pixel shaders to look better and run faster.
I just added procedural texture blending to the Phoenix terrain; it now blends between different textures based on slope, and between variations of the same texture to reduce tiling artifacts.
All of the basic movement activities in Lugaru 2 are working now! Walking, running, crouching, sneaking, rolling, and jumping are fully functional. Phoenix (the Lugaru 2 game engine) uses a unique animation system that creates animations on the fly based on surface and physics information, and even the character’s personality and current state. For example it is very easy to change a character’s walk to be more aggressive, lethargic, cheerful, feminine, and so on. This means that all of the characters move differently, and all of the activities transition absolutely seamlessly into each other, for example running->rolling->crouching is just one fluid motion.
This system is still in fairly early development (it was rewritten from scratch last week), but it is already fully functional and shows all of the features described above!
Here is a short video showing Turner moving around using Phoenix animation (with motion blur turned off to show the animation better):