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[BleakProspects]

Added sand and started experimenting with shore foam.

[Swaggermuffin]

Added sand and started experimenting with shore foam.

And the world was made more beautiful for it.

I really want to see all of this in motion.

[Tueman]

O_o It looks so amazing...

[emacs]

Looks great, I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

[zalzane]

y'know if I didnt know any better, I'd think you had already completed the game and were only now publishing the devlogs on a regular interval to drum up interest in your game.

[Quarry]

That's so 

[zalzane]

Yeah, but it makes excellent sense from a business perspective.

[errik]

Just found this and gotta say it looks very nice 

Keep up the good work!

[Pineapple]

I love you

[BleakProspects]

When the total water level is just one unit high, it now draws a puddle instead of filling the entire square with water (this is done by the shader):



As a side note, my performance is now horrible. I get like 5 FPS in debug mode, and ~40 FPS in Release mode (was previously getting >60 on both). The water shader requires me to render the scene 4 times in total. I need to optimize, but I will also provide options to disable portions or all of the water shader for people with worse video cards.

[Tueman]

Looking good as always!

[Quarry]

Shaders are really not required, just keep the half transparent water texture

[emacs]

That puddle is a nice touch, but if it hurts performance that much, perhaps you could instead change it to a 2D overlay or something.

[Chris Pavia]

Shaders are like the One Ring, once you've used them they are impossible to resist.

[BleakProspects]

3D water simulation was confusing me a bit, and I was running into bugs with other aspects of the engine, like chunk boundaries -- and I couldn't separate bugs from implementation problems. So, I made this little 2D test bed thing to develop water flow algorithms:

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/69146

Soon, this sort of algorithm will be in the game. Not quite yet happy with it, as water on the surface flies around like crazy, and there isn't yet a pressure model.

[Kinasin]

Looks fucking sick 

[Dementor561]

This looks fantastic I wish I could play it.

[BleakProspects]

Got some kind of dynamic water thing working which seems semi-reasonable. I will post a video of it tomorrow.

Also spent a lot of time profiling. Turns out water rendering isn't hugely expensive. What's hugely expensive is rendering all the little sprites (dwarves + trees) 3 times for the reflections and refractions. Why would that be? Well, there were two major problems: first, I was accidentally frustrum culling for every single entity one at a time instead of in batch using the octree. Second, my frustrum culling wasn't actually doing anything, so sprites were getting rendered even when invisible. Those two things were taking up about 40 percent of the performance. Third, resetting the sprites' color is much more expensive than I thought (have to send a new VBO to the graphics card for that), which took up about 25 percent of the performance per frame.

So all in all I was spending like 65% of my time doing unnecessary things to render trees! Removing those gives me a huge performance boost. In release mode I usually get 60 FPS now again, but in debug mode it's still around 40. Pretty acceptable.

I will have to come up with a more clever way of doing lighting of things -- I will probably implement a shader which takes the light as a parameter for the simple sprite objects. This will also make day/night lighting much easier, as I can pass in a parameter for the time of day. (Pretty sure that's how notch does it anyway)

[BleakProspects]

The beginnings of dynamic day/night lighting using a custom pixel shader:

[SolarLune]

Nice. Good-looking effect. Maybe more of a blue tint for night-time would look nice. Otherwise, keep it up!