Hello and welcome back!
Oh my god, yesterday there was really a severe storm in germany. It nearly blew my smartphone out of my hands. I was really lucky to arrive at home before they stopped the local train traffic.
Nevertheless we continued. What did we do in the last days? Ok first we did bug testing. We got the hint that the chests are removed when walking around. Ok we created a test map to find this bug:
There was indeed a bug which affected the case when you get out of sight and then return to the box. But I am not completely sure if this is the bug which was reported. I checked it with the test level and no box disappeared. We will see...
And then we implemented our own normal generation algorithm. We did this because we also want to add parallax mapping and perhaps some advanced stuff. So our normal generation algorithm is also encoding the bump map height in the alpha channel of the normal map. So we can relatively easy add new rendering algorithms. We are finally using a Sobel 5x5 filter for our main normal map. Here are some screenshots of the normal map which was generated with our program and not with GIMP:
The shadow is a little bit stronger.
And we also generated a normal map for the plants:
Here we blured the plants and then combined it with the fine structures. This again was then the input for our normal mapping algorithm. But I admit that the bump mapping for the plants is not so visible as the normal map of the solid materials.
And we are also currently working on a new configuration dialog. I never liked the start dialog. And as we want to improve the renderer in the future there will be lots of different settings. To handle this efficiently we want to use an automatic generated UI.
And there is also a strange bug which brings the main lightmap to change to black. We will find a solution. And there was also a bug where the lod of the depth map was different as the lod of the world. We changed it now so that every view uses the same lod!
And we also added a compass on top of the screen:
And the ferns are now also moving in the wind!