So yeah turns out writing a custom shader for water isn’t as easy as it seemed. My journey this week has taken me past fragment shaders and animated normal maps, reflection probes and gaussian highlights. Never could I have imagined that something as simple as water could take so much math.
But now, one week and several failed shaders later, I think I’ve made something I’m happy with.
Enjoy this screenshot of a soldier contemplating his life decisions while looking over the new and shiny ocean. (Also notice the skybox in the background I found on the internet, and the details in the grass that appear when zoomed in.):
There’s a link to the demo version in the video game thread but that doesn’t include the new graphical improvements yet. I can make a slightly more updated build soon if you want @TeaKing.
I’m glad y’all like the new water I worked very hard on it! Actually learned HLSL just for this.
A long standing issue I’ve had with my game was that the player and the enemy city could sometimes spawn on seperate islands. When this happened the game basically broke because there would be no way for them to reach of fight each other.
With all of my new water I had an idea though to fix this though. The pretty water would no longer just be a decoration, let’s take the fight to the seas!
I made this model in Blender today. It’s inspired by an ancient Greek trireme, but in the same simplified ‘plastic-y’ style as the rest of the game. I even animated it!
After doing nothing but contemplate his life choices for two weeks now our soldier has finally reached a conclusion: He just needs some new toys!
Today I gave him a new choice of weapon, a spear. Spears are characteristic of Hoplites (which the soldier character is based on), and their a great defensive weapon to complement the more aggresive swords. I also finally made it so the soldier can get on the ship and be transported across the water!
At this rate I’ll probably have the next workable build within a week!
Hello my fellow gamers! Today I come to you, not with a pretty screenshot, but with a pretty game!So, @TeaKing, if you or anyone else are still interested in playing it you can do so now.
The new build features: Improved Graphics, an in game help-tab, Ships, Spears, Upgrades for your city and an AI that actually does anything (sometimes).
I know I said it would be done within a week, but I added some features I wasn’t originally planning on including. Also, it turns out programming AI’s is, like, pretty belgiuming hard. It’s probably still a bit buggy.
Despite that I’m still happy with the result and I hope you’ll enjoy playing it too!
You fools. You thought this thread was over just because I stopped developing my game? Think again! I always have at least three projects going at once. This time I started doing something that might actually help Thrive one day: I’m making a galaxy generator. I’m not sure how detailed I’ll go with this yet. I’d like to have a star-map and seperate star systems (procedurally generated.)
The star is fully recoularable. It can be any mix of bright and dark colours, though some look pretty ugly. I made it by taking a texture of the sun, introducing some noise to randomise it, and then seperately recolouring the highlights and shadows. The texture is then triplanarly mapped onto a sphere to remove weirdness with UV coordinates.
If you haven’t noticed yet, I have a lot of free time lately.
I’ve made some progress working on star math, but I can’t say that what I’ve done is 100% accurate. As it turns out, stars are incredibly complex objects, probably about as complex as any planet. This means summarising them in a couple of equations is basically impossible. Furthermore, scientists don’t actually know everything about the inside of stars and how they form yet.
That’s why my equations come from statistics more than physics. Overall, my goal with this project is to create something that could survive a casual inspection by an astronomer. It doesn’t have to simulate everything in detail (that would be a better project for a nobel prize than a game), but the numbers do have to look convincing.
I won’t bore you with the exact equations I used.
The gist is that I randomly generated a mass according to statistical probabilities, and than used that to derive (approximately), a radius, a temperature, a luminosity, and a lifetime for each star. The star’s colour is based on its temperature. To demonstrate the lifetime of a star here’s 5 instances of the exact same star:
From left to right we see: A nebula that’s starting to consolidate (protostar), A main sequence star, a subgiant, a giant, and a stellar remnant (the supernova itself is not pictured).
