Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, a look at the (work-in-progress) "pit" area, an earth-and-stone cavity beside the tomb, connected to it in places where the tomb has begun to give way:
The week just past was a very slow one, I feel. Still, some work did get done, both on the level itself and on more technical points:
First of all, progress on the first level continued, now focussed more on the "pit" area shown above, and the tunnel and broken tiles that open onto it. I'm not yet sure of how happy I am with the look and feel of this pit. Further, some adjustments may be called for, as I've realised that it's awfully close to some of the tomb-walls surrounding it, and that the rock-outcroppings may be a little inexplicable. Nevertheless, it's a decent start, I think.
I also tinkered a little with the player-light shaders, making the shading a little more intense in my efforts to achieve that "somewhat-painted" aesthetic that I'm aiming for. I also removed the "flattening" of normals in the distance; while I hadn't liked the results previously, I feel that it may work better with the intenser lighting.
Once again, I'm not yet quite sure of how I feel about the effect as I have it thus far.
Continuing on the subject of shaders, I believe that I've made some improvements to the shadows, significantly reducing a set of artefacts that previously had been visible. With the player-light this comes at a slight reduction in the quality of the shadow-edges, and likely a slight drop in performance, as I ended up widening the shadow-camera's field of view. I think that it's a worthwhile trade-off, however.
On a more technical note, I've switched to rendering levels and combat-areas to an off-screen buffer. This allows me to more easily replace that buffer, which in turn allows me to (relatively) easily swap between a multisampled (i.e. antialiased) and a non-multisampled (i.e. non-antialiased) buffer. On which note, it's once again possible to toggle antialiasing from the options menu, I believe!
(The switch to off-screen rendering also allows for post-processing filters, should I decide to implement any in the future.)
I believe that I previously mentioned the addition of screen-shaking when the player is hit in combat. In the week just past, prompted by it being mentioned as a useful piece of accessibility, I believe, I made this feature optional: it should now be possible to toggle this screen-shake on or off from the options menu.
Finally, as per usual, there were a few minor bugs fixed that don't seem worth a more-detailed mention.
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
