When writing a game renderer, I’ve often myself found (as well as witnessed with other developers) that sometimes you just feel like something is just a bit “off”, and it kind of nags at you, even discourages you and takes the steam out of your devotion and attention. Often that thing is lighting/shadows. The internet is littered with posts from developers struggling to achieve realistic and just as importantly, accurate effects. I experienced such things when developing CRX’s renderer, as well as the current CORTech renderer. It was close, but no cigar. While in Frenzy this was less noticeable, and more acceptable to me, with Saucermen this was not going to pass muster.
Case in point – something was just off about my lighting, and it was more readily apparent when I solved that shadow puzzle. I sort of knew the problem, so I did research, saw a dozen different ways people were trying to handle similar issues. It’s one thing to look at tutorials for a static scene, but a whole other when dealing with a dynamic world in an actual game. I’d also like to shout out to the many people over the years that provide these very simple, but useful tutorials – without them I’d be nowhere with this. That includes the Orange and Red books, btw. All have greatly helped me develop techniques in rendering. What is truly exhilarating is when solving one thing leads to a huge amount of joy and relief as the floodgates suddenly open for further development to follow.
My lighting was off, and tracking it down at first wasn’t easy because I quite frankly had forgotten some things I did in CRX, and some basic principals. When dealing with a dynamic world, you have to remember some things also need to be translated – such as light sources, especially if you’re not using GL lighting. So you can see in this first picture of a corridor, while it may look ok at first glance, it’s really not.
The specular high lights don’t seem right, and the light/shadow effects are just a bit strange (like, the ceiling and floor). There were multiple things wrong here, but incidentally my shader code was completely correct – just the info being fed to it was wrong. Now look at this same corridor with the correct lighting.
As you can now see with the direct comparison, the game has “come alive” in terms of it’s lighting and shadowing. It’s now accurate, and you can now see that it’s fairly close to what we did in CRX.
This comparison also gives a pretty good contrast in both style, palette, and technology and how the CORTech engine is progressing forward. It is quite the difference already, and it’s only going to move rapidly from here on out.
Some of the assets I created for Alien Arena will be re-used and updated for Saucermen, such as some of the later “tech” items I created like the supports and floor pieces in this AA screenshot shown here. There is no doubt that I will re-imagine a couple of AA levels in Saucermen. At this time my plan is to have around a dozen maps or so – at this time I am focusing 100% on a single map however, and creating assets specifically for it. I’m also giving a lot of thought to the base game play, and will unveil some of those ideas soon.