Devlog 04 - Water, Shadows, Particles and more!

Welcome!

After finishing the basics of the editor last week I've started working on more graphics related features for the game. My current plan right now is to do graphics related features for the next couple of weeks and after finishing them I might start working on some more gameplay related features. 

The first thing I've done from the last update was adding normal mapping to the game. This makes possible to make some lower poly object look much higher poly than they actually are. As you can see on these 2 barrels, the left one is rendered without a normal map and looks much smoother than the one on the right, which uses a normal map.

The next thing I've added was showing text on the screen. The one you can see on the picture is just some basic text without any special effects, that I've created just as a quick tutorial when the game launches. 

The next big feature was adding the water and making it look as good as it looks. As you can see it in the video, it looks different from different view angles and also has an effect that makes you believe that there are some small waves on it.

One of the easier features of this weeks update were the particle effects. This fire is made of the combination of 2 different particle effects. Both change their textures during their lifetime and also have different lifetime, scale, direction, etc., but they are all loaded from the same texture atlas.

Maybe the hardest part of this week was adding shadows to the game. As you can see it in the video, the objects are able to cast shadow on the ground and on other objects too. The quality of the shadows will be on option that the player can choose in the game, because using really high resolution shadows that can be even seen from a bigger distance can become a bit resource hungry and maybe some of the older GPUs could easily drop some fps because of it.

As some finishing touches, I've added an option to play sounds in the 3D world. You can also notice this feature in the video where the music plays in the background and the fire has its own sounds that you can hear as you come closer to it

As always, thanks for reading and feel free to leave your suggestions in the comment section. See you next time!