Doolwind

Things are continuing along steadily towards the tech demo release. I decided to put together a closed alpha test mailing list for anyone interested in getting a sneak peek at CIC. The test will mainly be for hardware compatibility and network testing. I’m upgrading the AI to accomodate the added gameplay features however it will still just be simple AI for the purposes of testing rather than deep gameplay. One main area I want to test is multiplayer with multiple people sharing the command of a ship. I’m going to upgrade the multiplayer menu system to make this more user friendly and hopefully everyone will enjoy it. If you want to sign up fill out the form below:

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I’ve added a poll to the forum, let me know what you think by clicking here.

After adding environment mapping I decided I was on a roll and would add ‘gloss mapping’ to my models. The alpha values within the normal map now specify how glossy or reflective that part of the model is. The more reflective a pixel the more of the environment will be reflected from it. In the screenshot below I’ve simply put a few large lines on the ship with no gloss to show off the effect. In the hands of an artist this will allow for some interesting effects.

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On a whim last night I decided I wanted to add environment maps to my spaceships. This may be due to the fact I saw Ysaneya’s new model or that I can never say no to implementing some new graphical feature. What started out as being a small job turned into a mammoth exercise as I realised my entire material system was using regular (2D) textures rather than base textures which allows me to use either regular 2D textures or cube textures. After an hour of updating my entire material and rendering systems I now have full support for loading in any texture type.

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I’m looking for everyone’s opinion about the control the player should have over the phalanx system on their capital ship. I’ve implemented a simple system where the player chooses the direction and width to fire their phalanx defence in order to shoot down incoming missiles. The skill comes from figuring out where the enemy is going to attack your ship and therefore where you should fire your phalanx system to shoot down as many incoming missiles as possible. The phalanx system is basically a group of large cannons which fire large projectiles towards incoming missile in the hopes of hitting and destroying them.

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Just a quick update. I’ve just finished the auto path generation (version 1.0) and it’s working well. You can now choose where on the enemy ship to target and whether to fire directly or indirectly towards the target. The former means the missile will be travelling as fast as possible and is harder to shoot down while the latter can confuse the enemy as to where your missile is heading.

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Normal mapping is now in. If you excuse the dodgy programmer art you can see the difference. Also in the background is my first attempt at a new skyscape.

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The last week I’ve been working on making the graphics in CIC a little better than they are. I’ve created a new star field in Photoshop thanks to this tutorial. I wanted to keep the skybox textures to a maximum of 1024×1024 pixels which caused the star field to become quite pixelated. I had a think about possible solutions and the technique I have come up with works quite well without giving a noticeable artefact problem. I’ve tweaked the field of view of the camera when rendering the sky box so it’s now more like a fishbowl which means more of the skybox is on screen at once which in turns reduces the size of each pixel when rendering.

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