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[Greipur]

Just wanted to pop by and say that I'm grateful to see some non-humanoids, sci-fi worlds needs more of that.

[JobLeonard]

Very nice! Yes, using normal maps on sprites is quite an exciting new use of an old trick.

I can also see how it would require some polish - I can see the shadow contrast change on the ship as you turn it. makes it look a bit like you are crossfading between two sprites instead of a "proper fake" shadow. I think the reason is that the levels of your second normal map need to be "normalised" to match the first

[friken]

Just wanted to pop by and say that I'm grateful to see some non-humanoids, sci-fi worlds needs more of that.

Thanks! I agree, some of my favorite are the oddball aliens. I imagine when we do discover alien life it will be even stranger than our wildest expectations.

[friken]

Very nice! Yes, using normal maps on sprites is quite an exciting new use of an old trick.

I can also see how it would require some polish - I can see the shadow contrast change on the ship as you turn it. makes it look a bit like you are crossfading between two sprites instead of a "proper fake" shadow. I think the reason is that the levels of your second normal map need to be "normalised" to match the first

yep, you are correct.. our lighting was quite a bit off. It will take a couple attempts to get it right and learn so it is faster to make for the next ones.

[friken]

2nd ship, our artist did a much better job with the lighting than I was able to do on first ship:



Using our spiffy new custom sprite shader, it looks quite nice rotating ingame:


The gif compression makes the lighting look odd in some frames, the real video if you want higher quality sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loyq_vaXx-0&feature=youtu.be

[friken]

new ships in context of the race they belong to:

[karlozalb]

woah, that normal mapping is awesome, It adds a lot of depth. Is the shader hard to implement for animated sprites??

[JobLeonard]

Very nice man, tell you artist he has at least one fan of his work out there :D

[friken]

woah, that normal mapping is awesome, It adds a lot of depth. Is the shader hard to implement for animated sprites??

Thanks. I wrote a bit about implementation here:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/stardiver/news/stardiver-2d-sprite-lighting-for-spaceships

[Jeff Skyrunner]

Wow!

Haven't tried anything about the game yet, but the concept are really cool! It has been a while I haven't seen a sci-fi game so intriguing... at least on paper!

Well done and keep us posted

[friken]

Several more tweaks to our 2D ship lighting system. I'm thrilled w/ how 3d we were able to get the sprites to feel w/ spritlamp-like lighting and displacement-mapping:

Tilt:

Rotate:


gif compression is a bit much to look at lighting. youtube links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSivgCV2ZkA&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNjEV8p5MFE&feature=youtu.be

[DarthBenedict]

Impressive.

[JobLeonard]

That tilt effect is really impressive. I still feel like I can see the transition during rotation though - but that might just be me.

[Cakeypigdog]

Not seen this before. Looks so good. Following.

[friken]

That tilt effect is really impressive. I still feel like I can see the transition during rotation though - but that might just be me.

I'm curios what you mean by transition? Gif effect maybe? Whatever you see can you also see it in the video here?

[JobLeonard]

Maybe the simplest way to put it is that it looks like I'm looking at two subtly different depth models, between which we alternate with a crossfade as we rotate from 0 to 90 to 180 to 240 to 0 degrees again.

It's most notable on the shadows of the upper-left section of the ship - they suddenly vanish about 90 degrees in. Real shadows would project outwards from the sun, so they should actually shrink gradually as the ship rotates from 0 to 90 degrees, not suddenly disappear.

I'm not sure though, maybe it's an inherent limitation of normal mapping.

[friken]

It's most notable on the shadows of the upper-left section of the ship - they suddenly vanish about 90 degrees in.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. I've tweaked it a bunch more to get what I think is the best we can w/ the spritelamp-ish + displacement mapping. I'll post some more gifs once I get a couple ships full into game w/ attacks and AI.

[friken]

Hi guys. We have been inching our way along, making progress...slow progress but progress

This last week we finished ship designs for a handful more races.

Krex:


Dravlac:


Mooshee:


Moknon:


We have also completed our transition from 3d ships to 2d w/ spritelamp light lighting + displacement mapping. I'm very pleased with the results. Once I get a couple of these 2d ships fully moved into the game w/ attacks and AI, I'll post a gif or two or combat.

[JobLeonard]

EDIT: Looks great!

Just a thought (although it's probably too late now), but wouldn't it be easier to work with a hand-drawn height map than bumpmap? That's the other technique to get the same effect. You can even convert between the two, if you want to keep the normal map you already use for you shaders.

[friken]

EDIT: Looks great!

Just a thought (although it's probably too late now), but wouldn't it be easier to work with a hand-drawn height map than bumpmap? That's the other technique to get the same effect. You can even convert between the two, if you want to keep the normal map you already use for you shaders.

Thx. We use both a normal and height. The normal gives us the 2d spritelamp like lighting and displacement/height gives us ability to tilt in depth axis.