Here’s an excerpt from last 1,5 hours that I’ve spent designing a button for NG. This button to be exact:
Here I’ll try to explain how icons are being made for NG and why they are being made this way.
Just as planned – are all wares icons done. So far they are just preliminary sketches, but some are already looking nice. Proceed inside!
New wares ideas:
Yarn, Cloth
It has bugged me a lot to have skilled citizens cost the same as serfs – one gold chest. We can add new ware – Cloth. So that low-skill units (serfs, builders) cost just the cloth, and skilled ones cost the Cloth+Gold. Obviously, under the hood of game mechanics, Cloth is going to be the same Gold under a disguise (that is limited resource that player need to produce). Neat thing about that, is that we can tweak units cost at a finer fractions, by tweaking Gold and Cloth production rates and labor costs.
To make Cloth we need a new industry consisting from Lamb Farm, where Breeder takes care for lambs and periodically trims them for wheat and makes it into yarn. Yarn is taken to a Weaver house where it transformed into Cloth. Lamb Farm functioning is yet unclear, but idea is that it fits within Tier 1 town and requires no input resources. Perhaps player will need to lay down Pasture on grass tiles, where each 2×2 area contains 1 lamb. Or maybe the Lamb Farm is just a big 4×4 house where 4×3 backyard is occupied by a pasture.
Cider
Since Tier 1 has only Smoked Fish so far, we need another sort of food that can be made quickly without long production chain. Meet the Cider, made from apple trees. Apple trees grow within fenced areas, that are require to be built separately near the CiderMaker house.
P.S. I’m planning on writing a post explaining Tier system in more detail soon.
Developing a game without graphics is hard. For example, opening Storage house and seeing set of empty squares with numbers below – what are these invisible wares? That was irritating me for a long time, so at last I got myself a goal -I shall not do any further work until I have a full set of icons for wares. And with that, during last couple of evening I’ve been working on ware icons:
Ware icons
To this moment 16 icons were added (and one more while I was writing this blog, but I’m lazy to redo the pic). Of course some came out better, some worse, but the thing to keep in mind – they are all just placeholders, they are not final. Each one (maybe except for timber) can be greatly improved. However, for the moment the goal is to have them done, to have a base from which they can be analyzed and improved. In design there’s nothing worse than lack of any ideas – an empty sheet of paper.
P.S. As always, your ontopic and offtopic comments are more than very welcome – they are vital!
Here’s what’s new from the last week:
Objects reflected in water
One of the remaining issues is with the reflections, since they are computed once for the single water plane. The right lake has a lower water level and as you can see, the reflections are wrong. That can be fixed with rendering reflections individually for each water body, but that might affect the performance – this is what I’m planning to test now.
The biggest hit from the last weekend is an improved render, but lets maintain the order of events and start from top.
Firstly there was a lot of work on the water shader and overall rigging of it with the rest of the render pipeline. Water requires additional rendering pass over terrain with reflected camera to capture the reflections into a texture, that then gets projected on to a water surface. And since these are shaders, there’s also another trick in rendering the same terrain but clipping it to water areas to access waterbed depth – which means terrain gets rendered once again. Which did not fit well with inherited single-pass render. But it’s mostly solved now, with except for water areas setup (cover, height, waterbody properties). Beautifying water is another task altogether.
Then there was separation of atmosphere settings and addition of the fog into shaders:
Fog
Fog is a “cheap” effect, which games use mostly for 2 goals – hide the distant geomerty from rendering and to add a sense of distance to the world. In this render fog is specially made more dense and milky for now, later I will tune it to look more natural and don’t spoil much of the games colors.
Adding water and then fog to the game were the last straws – performance plummeted down to barely acceptable 19fps on a simple test map with 3 dozens of units and a bunch of houses by the lake. Weekend was spent on that problem. Solution was trivial – put the GPU to work and start using it for caching geometry. Results are impressive, ingame fps rocketed up to 119fps (more than x6 improvement!). There are bunch of thins left to cleanup, but overall I’m very satisfied with how it is going so far 🙂
Last 2 evenings I’ve spent researching into water rendering tutorials, looking for a nice water effect shader. It is quite hard to find one. Most of the times the result is less than satisfactory and older OpenGL functions are used, resulting in complicated pipeline. Luckily I have found a few good ones, so here’s my first attempt – this is a test-bed example:
Notice how deep water has more deep colors and how far away water surface is more reflective. Colors and coefficients can be tweaked to make water look more muddy or crystal clear. Shallow water with the same as above settings looks good too:
There are no ripples and no sun specular highlight yet, I might add them later or see into trying out a different water shader first. This one has some imperfections:
See the deep water color, when the water depth changes quickly it is noticeable that the volume color is rendered on the water surface. That wont be noticeable much in the game, if there are no plateaus underwater. Another limitation is that only flat water surface is allowed and that surface has to be one per whole map. I can make it 2-3, but that would eat some more performance, because each next one will require additional rendering pass (~30% fps).
Questions for discussion:
– single flat water surface per level, is that acceptable?
– several unconnected flat water surfaces per level, is that acceptable?
– how important for mapmaking is to be able to edit water height level for each tile?
– anything related?
Another week has passed without major news.. It seems there are no news at all.. How about some more artwork then? The new artwork comes from a freelance artist. Meet the builder:
Builder
This guy is a core of the Next Game world, he builds it all. Given enough stone, timber and time, he can build a full-blown Castle all by himself! Isn’t that impressive 😉
