Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
We made a bunch more progress on force thaumaturgy this week, specifically on visual effects for powers that involve shields, barriers and enveloping things. These aren't inherently as complex compared to what we wanted to achieve for powers like force blast, but as always there's a huge difference between just doing something and doing it well, and also maintaining good performance.
Without resorting to prohibitively expensive methods, it's hard to get away from the texture-slapped-on-polygons look. Using a combination of 2D and 3D effects presents a lot of challenges in terms of animation, interaction with objects, seams in transitioning from 2D to 3D and generally maintaining an illusion of depth. We also want a consistent, detailed, organic look to the effects, not something overly plain or just messy and blurry. We found some really nice solutions to most of these problems, and we've generally gotten through the bulk of the effect work, but there's still some things we're experimenting with and haven't settled on.
Developing these effects is the most challenging part of force thaumaturgy, and we should be mostly done with it soon. However there is still plenty to do in terms of adapting them to all the individual powers, building their specific mechanics and also some general thaumaturgy mechanics with the introduction of multiple domains and generally more depth to the system.
Something else we got started on this week is some improvements to the pathfinding system. There's a few important goals here as well as some general upgrades and fixes. One goal is to improve how AI navigate around hazards, particularly in avoiding steep falls, but even being able to take advantage of things like makeshift bridges, or willingly crossing smaller drops if necessary. The most important change however is much better handling of multiple levels of depth, which is something that will be important in the upcoming new area.
That's all for now, we'll be back with more in a week as always.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
We made a bunch more progress on force thaumaturgy this week, specifically on visual effects for powers that involve shields, barriers and enveloping things. These aren't inherently as complex compared to what we wanted to achieve for powers like force blast, but as always there's a huge difference between just doing something and doing it well, and also maintaining good performance.
Without resorting to prohibitively expensive methods, it's hard to get away from the texture-slapped-on-polygons look. Using a combination of 2D and 3D effects presents a lot of challenges in terms of animation, interaction with objects, seams in transitioning from 2D to 3D and generally maintaining an illusion of depth. We also want a consistent, detailed, organic look to the effects, not something overly plain or just messy and blurry. We found some really nice solutions to most of these problems, and we've generally gotten through the bulk of the effect work, but there's still some things we're experimenting with and haven't settled on.
Developing these effects is the most challenging part of force thaumaturgy, and we should be mostly done with it soon. However there is still plenty to do in terms of adapting them to all the individual powers, building their specific mechanics and also some general thaumaturgy mechanics with the introduction of multiple domains and generally more depth to the system.
Something else we got started on this week is some improvements to the pathfinding system. There's a few important goals here as well as some general upgrades and fixes. One goal is to improve how AI navigate around hazards, particularly in avoiding steep falls, but even being able to take advantage of things like makeshift bridges, or willingly crossing smaller drops if necessary. The most important change however is much better handling of multiple levels of depth, which is something that will be important in the upcoming new area.
That's all for now, we'll be back with more in a week as always.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
