Just another small update on my progress with the game.
Getting Up To Speed
My redo of the game project is proceeding as planned. One change is that now instead of a 1-camera setup, I have three cameras, to render equipment, the world, and the sky separately. A “camera” functions as the player’s eyes in a scene. Each camera has a near and far clipping distance, it’ll only draw objects within this specified range. When there is a wide range in these values, there are more rendering issues that you’ll encounter. Also, I can apply different effects and filters to each camera.
Unity 5
Recently I upgraded to Unity 5 for the new version of Against the Wall. I didn’t realize this at first, but my old custom shaders (code that tells your graphics card how to draw something) were no longer compatible with the new version of the game engine. Everything pretty much looked flat and washed-out, but I didn’t realize how bad it was until I looked at the two versions side-by-side. I spent last Monday after work updating my shaders to the new stricter guidelines and standards that the engine requires. Fun times.
DirectX 11
The final Windows version of the game will not utilize DX11 for graphics rendering. Why? for some reason, it does not play well with the “atmospheric scattering” shader that I use for my sky (that works perfectly well under the older DX9). I spent much of Sunday fixing it, but the result left much to be desired. The alternative skybox shaders and scripts that I’ve found either don’t render cloud planes, or are hard-wired to have a horizontal horizon. Crazy, right?
Also, not developing with DX11 in mind makes things simpler for me, since it is not compatible with Mac OS X or Linux. More differentiation between each release platform would have meant more dev time making sure the look and feel of the game is consistent. I’m already strapped for time as it is!
Also
I am going to the Boston Festival of Indie Games this weekend to show off my miniature fighting game called Nothing Good Can Come Of This. Stop by and say hi if you’re there!