Making
Whatever Alexander's working on, shared informally.
Smeeeeaaaaaring
Sometimes you have to really muck around with your rendering engine. Sometimes, the rendering engine mucks back:
The definition of "good enough". Don't ever let your professors tell you everything has to be infinitely extensible, kids.
Several problems here:
- An alpha test is failing in a shader, causing a circle on the screen to not update
- Despite having its parallax zeroed, the background isn't aligning correctly
- This scene requires two (kind of) full passes, and the second pass is occluding all the actors
- This may indicate a fundamental problem with how an entire Area of BLIGHTWRECK has been set up in terms of art/visual pipeline. It's probably fine. Probably.
I was originally going to title this post "Holes Holes Holes", but I opted not to because I hate that movie and it sucks.
Update (5:18pm)
Hmmph. More of a pain in the ass then I thought. I wanted this room to have some "blight goo", this weird, texture warpy stuff that covers walls. But this effect is pulled off through a shader and some weird draw calls, meaning that part way through trying to render the actors layer, the game gets confused, and stops rendering to one of the bespoke render targets. Oops!
I had a brief ponder about ways I could fix this. These are (sort of) two separate incompatible render passes, as they're both a hacky way of doing post-processing in a game and engine really not set up for post-processing. Maybe the two actors could co-ordinate? Communicate that a two layer render pass is happening, and a handle to the background surface needs to be passed around so we can maintain context?
Scope Hammer! We'll just do a texas switch and hard swap some layers/vfx in after a certain flag is set.
March 31st, 3:44PM PST | #blightwreck #sob #bug
How many rooms are filled with Torpedoes?
BLIGHTWRECK has a lot of scenes... I realized this as I was staring at a map of area 4. This got me wondering, exactly HOW many?
The definition of "good enough". Don't ever let your professors tell you everything has to be infinitely extensible, kids.
Thanks to GeeksForGeeks, who I incorrectly attribute in this screenshot as W3. I cribbed some Python code, and hacked it into giving me only the directories I really cared about. In case this all reads as visual noise to you:
Yeowza! That's a big number!
Have I really made that many rooms? BLIGHTWRECK is decently sized, but I wonder how this would stack up in comparison to PSYCRON...? Well, thankfully I still have the source code! Let's take a look...
Five years... has it really been that long?
I've got a list of rooms here (thanks GameMaker for throwing them all into one big directory), so one regex expression (ie, rm_a\dr\d+) later and we get a grand total of...
Drumroll.....
...
...
.
204! 204 rooms! So we've already passed PSYCRON. Going by numbers alone, this means that BLIGHTWRECK is at least 134% better if you only care about quantity. This isn't including all the other rooms I still need to make for Area 4, and Area 6 though.
Who knows, by the end of development, we might even be 150% better!
March 29th, 1:54PM PST | #blightwreck #psycron
The Fish Hallway
Part of designing BLIGHTWRECK involves a lot of thinking about levels. Sometimes, I have to really stop and ponder. How does a level in thematically? What's its intent? What will it be like to traverse with different sets of gear?
Glub. Screenshot taken from SZNZ (our level editor).
It's a neat little distraction. Area 4 is very "stimulating", so sometimes its nice to have a room where you can just chill with the fish.
Spotlights! Looking at this screenshot makes me wonder if I should raise the ceiling and lower the floor so things are centered a little better...?
Right, enough distractions, back to the fish!
