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.
No comments:
Post a Comment