next »

[hammedhaaret]

ah, cool.
thanks for the detailed reply!

we had a few problems with avoiding seems when matte painting the skybox for shelter 2 as well. we got around it by making the skybox into a sky... cylinder.  that way you can paint it flat and the distortion will be minimal. Only reason it worked is that we locked the camera so it can't look up too much. plus we didn't use it for any fancy lighting or anything.

the noise effect is good, I realized it was a wall when i reached it, but a few steps back and it just look like the fog again.

[ktch]

I worked on a emscripten port this week to get places run in browser. It's mostly completed now, although audio is still missing and performance could be better (less than 10% of what I get with native build).

You can check out Place 3 here http://jlv.sdf.org/places/place3

[acatalept]

Nice to see people embracing tech like Emscripten/WebGL/etc to run in the browser, really lowers barrier to entry.  And it's awesome that your full interactive experience is roughly the same size as the silly .WebM video in my website header!

BTW, performance is just fine here in Chrome with low end Intel HD3000 integrated graphics

[ktch]

Hehe, well it started out as a 130MB chunk of javascript code which initially had me a little worried Luckily it quickly reduced from there...

Lowering the barrier of entry was exactly the thinking behind this port. Especially fitting for lightweight experiences like places.

That's a very nice looking website btw

[ktch]

Doing some experiments with colors and how to go about making a very saturated scene... getting some practice painting skyboxes as well.

(Click for larger)

I also added shadow mapping support for less foggy scenes. Initially I was against it and felt that it would look out of place in a painterly scene but having tried and tweaked it now I must say that I'm very happy with the results.

[jctwood]

These colours are phenomenal, I want to see more yellows and oranges in games! I cannot seem to play the web port. I get past the loading screen but I can only see a slightly blurry static image. I am using safari which may not help.

[ktch]

Ah, yes... I don't think I ever tested it on safari. I found the cause for that particular issue but there seems to be a bunch of other problems as well that will take some more debugging time. Anyway, thanks for letting me know!  

[jctwood]

No problem!

[ktch]

Just bundled up Place 4! Get it here http://jlv.sdf.org/places/Place4-win32.zip

Pressing 'r' now regenerates the world so that it's slightly different each time.

I'd like to start moving towards more procedural world gen again. Something in line with the plant growing experiments I was doing last autumn (page or two back). But for place 4 here, I'm just splatting some predefined brushes (groups of plants) over the map and then rearranging them around a bit.

[jctwood]

Very excited to see more procedural systems.

[Bahototh]

Wow. all I can say is wow. So simple, yet really atmospheric!
I'd play this often and long. The look really sells it for me.

[Deathcraft]

Great work with colors, I've checked out Place 3 and had a very immersive exeperience just walking around. Keep it up, hope this'll be a location for a game.

[ktch]

Hey everyone. Although I haven't been active here, I've been working on Place 5 for a while now.

Here are some screenshots of work in progress particle and weather improvements.

Engine wise there's also other improvements such as gamma correctness, multisample anti-aliasing, collision with trees and plants etc.

I've also streamlined my workflow by adding a simple editor that allows me to place trees and plants in realtime while in the scene. Although I talked about wanting to do more procedural stuff in the last post, Place 5 is going to be a hand crafted scene.

The biggest remaining hurdle right now are the textures. I have a pretty good idea in my head what I'd like the scene to look like but it's taking some trial and error type experimenting to how to achieve that.

[Pineapple]

Those weather effects are crazy gorgeous

[ktch]

Thanks, Pineapple

Continuing work on Place 5. I was initially aiming to release it before christmas but time seems to be running short and there's a bunch of things still to be done.

This week I implemented moving clouds to make the sky more lively. I was pretty pleased with how simple and yet reasonable good looking the solution ended up being, as it's just a squashed skydome with a scrolling texture over it. It's alphaed out towards the horizon so that the clouds fade away instead of abruptly vanishing. Works well with the kind of fogged skybox i'm using as the lack of depth is not really apparent there. Some tall cumulus type clouds on a clear day skybox would probably look very weird though.

I sped up the cloud movement for these gifs, so it looks a little odd...

I've also been painting more textures, below are some spruces I added today.

edit: tweaked image links

[Kasperelo]

Beautiful!

[Manuel Magalhães]

This game looks wonderful, the colors and weather give it a lot of atmosphere.

[nicknicknicknick]

Loving each and every one of these... using them as soothing email backgrounds.

Have you considered putting them all up on Itch? It's... just a lovely platform for lovely games such as this

[Eigen]

Oh, man, it's so pretty..

[ktch]

Thanks everyone!

@newton64: Very cool! I do have my little platformer game on Itch (or atleast had, not sure if it still works...). I might put Places there as well when I finish Place 5.

Progress on P5 is slow but steady, a couple of hours here and there. The second screenshot below has a flashlight I quckly hacked in just now to see how that might look. Slightly larger versions are on my tumblr.