More graphics

I haven't been very good at posting this semester, but I have been doing a lot of work on the graphics system. I added an animated sprite management system which I think is more efficient than trying to do particles. I didn't get rid of the particle system, but for certain effects (explosions, gravity well, plasma balls, ship energy centers) I decided that an animated sprite would look just as good as particles. I also added explosions and the gravity well effect using the animated sprites.

I also added a space dust system. Basically it generates a few random white spots around your ship that you fly through to show that you're moving. When the sprites get behind the camera, they respawn in front of your ship. I also had to put in a case for when the ship is going in reverse to handle spawning the sprites a little differently.

Finally, I added the icons for the shield, weapon, gravity and big bomb pods for the hud. I had to tweak the images a little because we wanted them to be color coded with the buttons that activate them.

The next thing I have to work on is getting some kind of trailing system in place. We want a trail to go behind the pods as they shoot and also coming out of the engines of the ships. We could do it using particle effects, but I'm also looking into trying something with the post processing system to see if I can get it to happen in the glow pass. I'm thinking of maybe adding another texture to the model that gets blurred and fades as time goes on.

Glow manipulation

I did a couple more things to the graphics engine to allow the glow to be turned on and off for certain objects. Namely, I made it so the pods only glow when they're in use. I also had to tweak my custom shader code because the normals weren't showing up correctly. The models were being drawn flat with no shadows. I figured out that this was because the actual normals of the ship weren't being used - just a normal map. What's supposed to happen is the normal map is used like a filter through which the actual normals of the models get passed. Without the actual normals, the normal map doesn't do anything.

I also tweaked the targeting mechanism so that not only does it consider distance of the enemy when deciding which enemy to lock onto, but also the angle between it's relative position to the player ship and the player ship's forward direction (in other words, how close is it to the player's targeting reticle).

Graphics engine overhaul

I should have posted this yesterday, but I forgot to. I re-vamped the graphics engine to accommodate post processing. As of now I have a glow post process implemented. To make an object glow, we give it a glow map - a texture mapped to the uv's of the object that's black except for where we want the object to glow. The new system renders the scene to a render target instead of the screen, and then blurs the areas of the image where the glow textures are mapped before drawing it back out to the screen.

I also finished up the lasers, though if I can get a post processing/particle effects trail happening, I might redo the lasers again to make them more efficient. In order to get them to be the right shape, I had to make 3D models instead of just billboard sprites, but if I can figure out how to make a trail behind an object, I'll go back to the sprites. I have to work on the trail anyway for the ships and the pods, so if i can get it working right I'll try it out on the lasers too.

AI, Laser and other tweaks

I improved the AI so that it's a little more fun to fight. They now speed up after they fly by you so you can't catch them without using an engine pod. When they turn around and start to fly back toward you, their speed cuts in half so you have more time to shoot at them. This solves the problem of the game moving too fast without compromising the speed of the ships.

I also tried for hours to get the lasers to billboard around the z-axis instead of around the y-axis with no success. After profiling the engine, we decided that we can use a model instead of a billboard sprite and it wouldn't cost us too much more.