Eniko Foxso @Farbs said something about beveling the edges in my block game and that got me thinking and looking at some old 2D terrain art i did
i'm thinking i may stray from minecraft's aesthetics a bit and use this as a sort of style guide
okay so this may seem a little unorthodox but bear with me here
what if
shell texturing in block game
Can't decide if using shell texturing is a great idea or a stupid idea
i feel like i could soften the terrain significantly through no more than normals along the edges of blocks so i made this mockup in photoshop and i think this could actually work?
corners would still look kinda pointy but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
if i kind of artfully place the camera to cut out the cornflower blue void surrounding this tiny chunk of terrain on all sides its almost starting to look like a real game :D
trying to add a faux edge bevel through normals and actual lighting equations is proving extremely challenging and i'm starting to give serious thought to manually baking the lighting into the textures
after endless futzing about and tweaking i think i have something that may just be workable for this faux bevel effect i want
(note that there's a "bevel" between adjacent blocks cause i haven't made the effect dependent on the block's neighbors yet)
I dunno I'm just not feeling the actual lighting model. Its not like minecraft exactly has realistic lighting anyway: blocks are lit from two opposite sides!
But the problem with baked lighting is if you have non symmetrical blocks you have to make 4 versions of each face to get all the lighting. Not that that's super onerous
Also if I made something like a lectern that would be a lot of work to do manually for each orientation
On the other hand when I made isometric games I'd have to make two of everything to get the lighting right and I didn't mind that so much so maybe I'm overthinking it
ok i figured out a reasonable way to fudge the normals so i won't have to manually bake lighting. basically what i do is set the normals of the edges so that they point towards where the adjacent faces are pointing (90 degree bend) and then i lerp from the face's lighting factor to the neighbor's lighting factor
that gives me the result on the left. i tried just having regular, actual normals, but it creates artifacts like on the right (its accurate that it shades it like that but it looks bad)
i was worried the corners would look too sharp without modification but honestly the smooth gradient does a great job without blunting the corners
took all day but i've optimized the vertex format for blocks *and* implemented auto-bevelled terrain. shown without textures to make the bevelling clearer
doing a side by side with my style guide i think i'm getting there. i'll probably wanna do some fancier color grading on the lighting though, and i want outlines, but the soft rounded feel of the terrain is definitely there now even though its still all cubes
i've brought back the grass, which is actually an obj model
see i made an engine before and appropriated it for this project. it could load obj models (with normal maps) so at first the blocks in my world were actually loaded from obj models
that's why i had to redo a buncha stuff to add the bevelling, since i had to generate the faces myself
I should probably start linking up chunks before I do much else so I don't wind up having to deal with a ton of "this block's neighbor is in another chunk" situations later
had a silly idea for block outlines using the bevel system. i take the dot product of the vector from the camera to the world position with the normal to determine if the bevel normal is pointing away from the camera, then add an outline based on that. there's some outlines where they don't belong but i can get easily rid of those
... i don't hate it? 🤔
lol the outlining has more than doubled the code in my fragment shader
texturing, lighting, and bevelling: 12 lines of code
just doing outlines: 19 lines of code
Not to pat myself on the back too hard but it's really nice how good this is turning out, like, aesthetically. It's not exactly trivial to make graphics look good when you only have a single 16x16 texture >_>
On the other hand I guess it would be fair to say these graphics are looking a little...... muddy
Eh? Eh? Eh? :D
i'm commander shepherd and this is my favorite spot on the citadel
(seriously i cannot get enough of looking at this particular subsection of a screenshot i took of the outlines in my voxel engine)
debating what i wanna do with grass in my engine. atm i have a block shader, and a model shader. i feel like i could efficiently implement shell textured grass by making a shell texturing shader, but i also don't want to balloon the number of different shaders i need to render all my terrain 🤔
i could just use the model shader, but it becomes a pain in the ass to implement shell textured terrain then
i could try and combine it with the block shader but they both do really different things
hmm if i want to add bits to the shell texturing so it doesn't look bad viewed side-on i kinda have to go the model route
though i figured out i can get away with only 6 variations to get all the edge transitions 🤔 that could be doable if a bit annoying
i'm overthinking the grass thing so i've made the textures required to make the shells for a 16-tile transition and i'll just generate the model for each of those 16 and implement them in the engine and move on so i don't wind up blocked by choice paralysis
if i want i can always just change it later
here it is compared to my style guide image. how did i do, chat?
i probably wanna pull the grass away from the edge a bit more because it obscures the outlines, but i'm pretty happy with this overall
At the moment the wild grass is actually a block on top of the dirt (like carpets in minecraft) but I'm thinking maybe I should change it so that the grass is part of the dirt block that sticks out above it as it were. That way things can occupy the same block as the grass without deleting it, like shrubs, flowers, or other non-opaque blocks
here's another close up i really enjoyed of the terrain in my block game
i've got columns of chunks working, but they're not really connected at the moment so i gotta fix that next
chunks connect properly now! with bonus shot of the sprawling cave systems beneath the surface
i made a staged chunk generation system where chunks can request their neighbors be generated but only up to a certain stage, which keeps the generation from going infinitely in all directions, because the requested stage must always be lower than the chunk's current stage of generation
you can see through the sides of chunks now because the chunks (correctly!) note that their underground sides faces are obscured. it's just that they're obscured by chunks you can't see because they haven't fully been generated yet
Joshua Barretto@eniko Time to throw the generator on another thread! 😄
@jsbarretto i fixed it for now by only running one generator per frame >_>
mort@eniko @jsbarretto This is secretly what I do, I had these grand plans of making a separate world server which can handle async loading and storing and generating world chunks as needed without bogging down the main thread
But then .. I just didn't do that and instead made it generate up to N chunks per frame and store everything in RAM and it's been working well so far :)
(Granted, 2D is WAAAAY simpler to work with than 3D for this)
@jsbarretto It's a tile based 2D side scroller, with a focus on different kinds of tiles interacting together. I want it to become a game where you build automation and power generation and stuff like that.
I try to strictly limit terrain modification, despite it being tile based. So you can't freely dig with a pickaxe or something like you can in Minecraft/Terraria. Instead you only really have dynamite to help you destroy terrain. The stuff you can place and break freely is non-terrain tiles
@jsbarretto Here are some posts I made with screen recordings:
* Platforms: https://floss.social/@mort/115163019758957838
* Water/drains/aqueducts: https://floss.social/@mort/115095098960294958
* When I redesigned trees: https://floss.social/@mort/114848506189883657
* Bonfire, crucible and basic "metalurgy": https://floss.social/@mort/114760772338768620
* Dynamite: https://floss.social/@mort/114831071309325111
And it's open source: https://github.com/mortie/project-swan
mort (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image I have implemented platforms, a new tool for making bridges and making cave exploration etc nicer. I think they'll be an important element in letting the player build and create things while keeping the feeling of the world as this semi-immutable pre-existing thing that you can't just modify at will #gamedev #gamedevelopment
@mort Fun! I love the sandspiel-style water physics.
@jsbarretto Thanks! I honestly do think the water turned out really well. Here are some more videos which showcase that specifically:
* https://floss.social/@mort/114460794334161869
* https://floss.social/@mort/114882335241433318
I'm thinking that pumping/moving water around will be an important part of making mechanisms and automation, but I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring exactly what to do with it.
mort (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image It's been a while since I showcased my game's dynamic water system, and I haven't posted about it on this account. So here's a video. I think it turned out pretty nice! (The dynamite explosion effect is not final, don't worry) #gamedev #gameDevelopment
@mort I realise this is a bit of a flip in direction, but I love games that require you to manage resources like water. What if you had the surface be dry and scorched, and the game was about using ingenuity, pumps, and other mechanisms to bring the water to the surface from an aqueduct to grow plants?