Hi to all,
This is the last preview before releasing B8 update: All improvements planned have been implemented :).
The last improvements have been focused on the terrain and materials painting system
New layer blending
Material layer blending shaders have been re-written by taking into account layers heightmap (stored into alpha channel). This makes the transition from a layer to another more realistic, as showed into the following animated gif:
Decals painting
Now decals can be painted in the same way you can paint on "standard" objects. Decal alpha transparency is stored into the layer mask alpha channel. Decal layers (also alpha channel) are blended in the same way as other object materials:
Up to 132 Terrain Layers
Finally terrain layers have been increased from 4 to 132!!
This is possible because now every terrain tile can have more than one material assigned (1 base material, just as before, plus up to 32 detail materials) to it, and every material, as usual, can have up to 4 layers for a total of 132 layers.
For every material, terrain tiles are re-drawed, unlucky this could be potentially heavy for GPU and GPU drivers (imagine to draw the terrain up to 32 times...).
So as an optimization the system has been designed to automatically compute the materials that a tile must have by checking if the tile covers a part of the material mask that isn't empty. In this way the tiles are drawed only if it is necessary, so speeding-up the rendering.
In addition the detail materials are skipped at a certain distance.
The terrain material editing also has been simplyfied and merged with the material editor. In this way you can easily edit terrain materials as they are standard materials: creating masks, editing layers and properties.
The following are some screenshots of a scene used for testing (the player character is taken directly from the easy game pack :)).
Other
There are a lot of other minor improvements like
- Custom material masks,
- Custom input map loading,
- Terrain base material new parameters like min/max slope, min/max height and slope/height fallofs
- Immediate asset search in browsers
- Many other crash fixes
WHEN WILL IT BE RELEASED?
B8 version is planned for the next monday.
Fingers crossed :)
Stay tuned ;)