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[danieru]

Really like the amount of updates here. Keep it up!

That is good to hear! Me and Ren were inspired by the Even The Ocean guys. They update day in day out even if no one posts. Their dedication is just inspiring.

[.Uberren]

Did some rearranging of the paddies in the farm tiles, along with changing the pumpkins to hay bales.
Going to make more changes to the texture next.

[danieru]

Here we go the farms are in game:



This should make it easier to judge how the farms fit in with the visual style when texture'ing it.

[Rebusmind]

Do they have a function or are they just for the visuals?

[.Uberren]

Farms are just for visuals, they have no function
We wanted something to break up the monotony of having grass almost everywhere.  They provide the same amount of defense as a grass tile.

Here's my...third? iteration of the farm tiles.  The house has been changed to a grain elevator and I got rid of those ugly dark green fields and replaced the pumpkins with bales of hay.  I made the grain elevator quit a bit smaller than other structures on the map so that it, hopefully, won't be confused with other capturable buildings.

[.Uberren]

Another update to the farms.  I will most likely leave it as this for now.

[Rebusmind]

I like the new farms, but I would increase the poly count of the bales of hay a little, because at first I thought they were little wooden huts. :D

[.Uberren]

lol, good point on the bales of hay.
I went back through and did more clean up, lowered the polycount overall, and upgraded the wooden huts to bales of hay.
I also changed the dirt around the grain elevator to wheat so that there wouldn't be so many dark tiles getting generated in game.




Meanwhile, Daniel's been playing around with post processing effects:

[danieru]

If you are like me you'll have heard lots of talk about post processing pipelines. They arose in popularity along with screen space effects like SSAO, FXAA, Bloom, HDR, color toning, all those cool AAA things.

Super Battlelands being written in javascript we need to push some rendering logic to the GPU. This is stuff that in a faster language would be done on the CPU using a library. Stuff like idle animations are computed in a custom shaders. By volume Super Battleland's shaders do not look like those in AAA games. We perform no real time lighting calcuations which in an AAA 3d game would make up the bulk of calculations. In exchange our GPU workload is more branch heavy and thus less suitable for GPUs.

So working on post process effects is fun because it gives me a rare chance to do more traditional stuff. Here is what I have:



Notice how the map behind the top hud is blurred. This was done in our stage 1 post processing shader. Before today we've used the effects composer for the super sampling. We would render at 2x resolution then downscale in a copy shader. Now we take that downscaled rendering and perform a selective blur, shift the colors warmer, and boost brightness. Doing this after the downscale is important for performance because the blur's texture reads are expensive and the effect does not benefit from super sampling.

Sorry, it appears I broke the Lumos Alliance HUD.

[danieru]

We've been feeling guilty that neither of us rotate the camera or really make use of the 3d. This has got me thinking of concrete ways to exploit the 3d. Thus I present to you:

Bird's Eye view


Err, this is the sort of thing that _needs_ to be a gif.  The only fun in this feature is having the camera pan and zoom at the press of one button. With speed lines and camera shake it should look quite choice.

In other news I am looking forward to the Tokyo Indies meetup. It will be my first and I cannot wait to meet with other devs.

[RujiK]

Personal preference:

That dark brown wheat/logs/crop in the farm zones is too dark! It clashes with the rest of the palette.

[danieru]

Personal preference:

That dark brown wheat/logs/crop in the farm zones is too dark! It clashes with the rest of the palette.

Ha! I was just telling Ren that. 
Thanks for mentioning it 

[.Uberren]

We realised the scale of the farm tiles was a bit too small compared with the rest of the map, so I went back and scaled them up so one paddy filled an entire tile.

And RujiK, I lightened the dirt tiles and altered their hue to be more in line with everything else


Sorry about the dark background, I changed the colour of my Maya viewport, lol

I also redid the beach tiles so they used their own cliff models like the grass tiles do.


I also went back through all of the ground tiles and added more polygons to them so that the bouncing that occurs when you select on the map would stop causing gaps to appear in between the tiles.

There's no screenshot of it at the moment, but I also added a "skirt" around the bottom of sea units so that they would have something similar to the shores do.

[Sjonsson]

Looking good! I suggest you make the art for the field tiles overlap the borders a little bit so they will tile seamlessly with other field tiles.

[.Uberren]

Hey Sjonsson!
By field tiles do you mean the farms? Originally that was my plan, but we decided we would rather have these tiles have some sort of border to look a bit more like individual paddies instead 

[danieru]

Last night was the Tokyo Indies meetup, and it was awesome. The only bad thing was the congestion and how horribly I presented SB.

Thanks to A. Phu for organizing it. And thank you to Dreeps for their sweet postcard.



Trivia: japan is the land of the namecard. *Everyone* has one. Except me. They are not expensive so I need to order some, no excuses there.

[Bombini]

Looks lovely!
Cant wait to try it

[Sjonsson]

Hey Sjonsson!
By field tiles do you mean the farms? Originally that was my plan, but we decided we would rather have these tiles have some sort of border to look a bit more like individual paddies instead 

Yepp, those are the ones I'm talking about. In that case I think you should make it so the mud in the field stops earlier. Right now the divide between the field/farm tiles look like bleeding and not like a grass strip.

More like the right one:

[Reilly]

My suggestion is since you're using 3d you might as well emphasize it. Make the land higher than the water. Looks very flat right now.
Check out the vertical distance Advance Wars puts between ocean and grass.

[Mef]

Holy shit! This is like the most accurate translation of 16x16 pixel-art sprites/tiles that made GBA AW into 3d medium I have ever seen.

Visual perfection.