Early Access Update Tjugonio (29)
build id: 57276A74
nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
Reduced Development Tempo
As some of you know I've been away from Space Beast Terror Fright for a little bit, and I'm still not back up to full speed yet. Regardless I wanted to give you all an update so as to keep the game moving forward at least a little bit.
I still have some "real life stuff" to sort out in the coming weeks, but I will be back up to a more reasonable speed of development as soon as I can.
Space Windows Version 1
There have been suggestions in the community along the lines of trying to make the game feel more like it actually takes place on a starship, and to that end perhaps add windows so you can see outside the ship.
I have managed to use a pretty cool and relatively computationally inexpensive inverted cube-mapping technique that I adapted from a shader by Inigo Quilez. With the right texture I could also get away with just a single 1024x1024 starfield that I think works pretty well.
The windows also cast a little bit of light, and I have adjusted the system so that these lights aren't affected by power failures. All together these things give the illusion of outer space existing outside the ship you are conceptually on.
I was careful not to make the starfield texture be too "cheerful" or "romantic" as can often be the case when nebulae and / or multicolored stars are used to heavily. I don't want the claustrophobic mood to be affected too much.
The windows will also only occur on the extreme edges of the map / ship. This is very much in order to not have to deal with the case of looking out a window and seeing the outer hull of the ship, and even worse being able to see back in through yet another window. All of that would require a ton of extra geometry to be rendered (with lots of overdraw), and also I wouldn't be able to get away with the magic shader that I'm currently using (which achieves zero overdraw).
All in all a good trade-off that doesn't cost too much.
I expect to be iterating on the windows a bit, not least more experiments with what might be cool looks for the outer hull, and maybe even more geometry outside the ship. I'm also thinking it might be good to add some kind of indication to where the actual glass might be. We'll see what happens.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
nornware Dev Feed
nornware on Facebook
nornware on Twitter
nornware on YouTube