I started some experiments with parallax mapped grass, they didn’t turn out to successful. With parallax mapping the grass can not extend out onto other geometry which made it look pretty dull. Next idea was to use shell rendering, this is an age old method used for realtime fur. ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ used it well on the ps2. But it still see...

I’ve had this idea for a fixed camera rendering system in the back of my mind for a little while. I thought I would put together a proof of concept. Basically the idea is that the world can only be viewed in isometric and top down oblique perspective, but the game is still a fully 3d world. The idea spawned when I was watching this video by Roll...

Entity Component System I’ve started building an ECS, specifically to manage the large amount of game units. The technical design of the game units would indeed fit in a deep class hierarchy, however I don’t believe this system will give me the flexibility or speed that I need. I took a glance at different c++ ECS libraries like EntityX, but non...

I did some experimenting with low resolution rendering of the game. Essentially I rendered the the scene to a texture and half or quarter resolution then scaled it back up to full size using nearest neighbour filtering. The results look pretty cool. At the lower levels of  resolution the graphics become somewhat abstracted, a representation of ...

Art direction Ive been playing around with the terrain shaders. I imagined the game having some form of pixel art, but still being a fully 3D world. Up until this point I’ve just been running generic default shaders with a sprite map from ripped from Minecraft. When I get round to creating the art assets for trees, players etc then I will settle...

I’ve made some decent progress over the last week or so. Working mainly on the world meshing and some dev tools. Urho3D has an editor built in but it’s very basic and quite ugly, also it’s written in Angelscript which I have little experience in. Rather than attempt to modify it I’m going to built some custom tools.</p> Shadows I had so...

Long time since the last update, the whole project has undergone some major changes. Very little of the code I had written as of the last update remains. I have made the decision to use an game engine, Urho3D. After a lot of thought it’s clear that if this game has any chance of existing complete then I need to do everything I can to speed up de...