dcfedor's blog

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Feels like it was a busy one here, though I can't seem to pinpoint why. Chalk it up to parenting, I guess :)

I resumed work on the new renderer today, fixing and tweaking progressively smaller factors. The aim is to hopefully arrive at the quality level we used to see with fully 3D lighting, but with faster performance allowing us to have more of them.

Hey Folks! Another light update day today, as a chunk of my time went towards working on the teaser/trailer script. I'm feeling pretty good about it, though, which is a relief. Before I reached out to Josh and got this started, I was a bit anxious it wouldn't be possible to make something exciting with the limited gameplay so far. But I'm definitely more hopeful now :)

Hey Folks! Bit of a short update today, to go with a shorter day. Plus, a lot of the stuff I did today was more administrivia.

I had to cut a new gameplay video for NEO Scavenger to be used on the Kartridge store. This one is meant to be a background video, so needed to be shorter, looping, and more demonstrative than a typical trailer. A couple hours to record the footage and cut it together, then notify parties waiting for it.

Hey Folks! We're gradually getting there, with more and more of the old game systems coming online with the new renderer. And today's screenshot isn't half bad!

Hey Folks! Started work today on merging the experimental renderer with the main project, and so far making steady progress.

There was a fair bit of blind work as I started copying over the necessary code and assets, and figuring out where the new stuff should live. I had some old procedurally-generated shadow mesh code that I could replace with the new square light-blockers I'm using. And the old Unity light prefab could be replaced with the new line-of-sight light component.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. I finally got with the times and started The Witcher 3, and it's pretty good so far. I don't know if I'm drawn in as much as some folks I've heard talk about it, but maybe my taste is changing. Still, I'm really digging the attention to detail and immersion.

Hey Folks! Adding a few more finishing touches to the renderer today, as I remembered the space prototype has objects that get rotated, animated, and have transparency.

So far, everything I've been testing was set to zero rotation, not animated, and opaque. So some of the calculations I was using start to break when things don't fit that bill. Fortunately, these are fairly standard problems and there's a lot of info out there on how to solve them.

Hey Folks! The line of sight and lighting test seems to still be going well. I've got it rendering multiple lights now!

There was one more bug to solve in the single line of sight/light code I've been working on, and that was to get the line of sight to behave when there weren't enough light blockers nearby. By doing that, I was able to get the light to produce nice round shapes regardless of the surroundings.

Hey Folks! A bit more progress today, as you can see from the image. I got a slightly better wall visibility trick working, and I'm working on limiting vision/light range.

Yesterday's trick to get walls visible was a bit hacky, and I wasn't thrilled with it. I basically just extended the vision rays outward a bit so they revealed chunks of the walls that stopped them. However, it revealed walls in weird slanting angles, and it was a bit distracting when they moved around. Interesting to look at, but for the wrong reasons.

Edit: I spent another 10 or so minutes after posting this today, and managed to get a wall reveal/penetration thing working! The image has been updated accordingly.

Hey Folks! Getting a bit closer now with the new rendering code. As you can see in today's screenshot, the line of sight mesh is now rendering appropriate texture colors for the exposed floor, as well as a simple lighting component based on the floor's normal maps.