Reboot comp: Genus Prima

[iWasAdam]

yep. it's Derron's Genus Prime. where you search for domination over planet systems, upgrade ships and generally have a quick battle with the AI.

Base battle system complete
ship upgrade complete in visual form - needs to be integrated into the battle
UI complete

But there needed to be some glue to connect everything. I 'think' (or the lockdown has just sent me completely bonkers) that the computer might be the way to go?

[iWasAdam]

Yep, not sure what the AI is going to be called - possibly Fandango?

sort of got the movements and expressions correct 

[Derron]

Evil AI taking over the space dominion by making others fight each other - sounds like the arc of Star Trek:Picard Season 1 ...


@ upgrades etc
Want to repeat myself over and over: make sure that it still kind of "fast paced" else you will end up with a different kind of game - which of course might even be better ... just ensure you know what you do


bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

agreed. it's slowly coming together now

here's a pic wen the enemy ship speed was throttled (bug), but it looks like there has been a party round the planet Bezen

[Derron]

"Rared" and "Burmes Home" expose that you do not properly center the font on the "circle". It is less obvious on "Bezen" and "Binuca Majo*" as the 0 seems to a pixel more "left". Maybe it is a matter of wrong glyph informations extracted from the font?

bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

ok, it's Saturday Screenshot (tech edition)... 


1. what is it
It's a space station - there are 3 of them in total

2. And what's interesting about it?
It shows a shader being linked into the render chain as a background shader. Then the 3d. This can now be separated so I can render just the 3d to a canvas and then add artificial alpha so 3d can now be on top of 2d

Will it be finished? We'll see. it will take as long as it takes...

[iWasAdam]

and a communication satellite from behind...

[MrmediamanX]

nice, do you plan on having the alien portraits?

[iWasAdam]

not sure on that as yet - we'll see.

Here's something a bit more interesting:


it's the 2d (faux 3d) view. there is a shader creating the stars and nebula and all the 2d drawing stuff done next.
But wait... isn't that a full 3d station? YES......!

How the holy wotsits is going on?

the 3d station is being draw offscreen into a bitmap in 3d on a magenta background (the camera rotation is matched to the 2d). We are then drawing a quad at the correct position with the contents of the 3d botmap. a shader then removes the magenta and the magic just happpens

[Matty]

Looks good Adam.

I have a challenge for you which is this:
Create a shader to draw a 3d ship model cut in half along any axis and with the cut region appearing solid not hollow and with glowing fiery ember like pieces eg as if it has just been cut along an axis with a red hot knife.

It's a neat effect if you can get it right for beam weapons.

[iWasAdam]

That's a very interesting suggestion. I'll report back...

[Matty]

A method I used was to have two models in the same position and with a pixel shader to draw with alpha zero all pixels on one side of an arbitrary plane and the other side normal.  It then involved drawing pixels projected on yo that plane where you would normally see rear facing triangles.  It worked but was too slow on mobile to look good.  I'll link a video to what I was going for:

https://youtu.be/n2_lQZFlKg4

[iWasAdam]

Needed a bit of work and head scratching, but Here's the basic proof:


to make it look solid you would need to add geometry - I'm not sure that would look convincing, much better to use a second 'internal' model to add all the slice contents, base floor, etc.

the next step would be to take to concepts and add dirt, ragged edges, some animation, detail etc
Add in some explosions and particles (photoshopped)

[Matty]

Great.  Looks neat.

It can look nice in motion when it separates too...

[iWasAdam]

hmm, you've given me an idea 
Let's see what I can do...