111–120 of 121 posts
Out of curiosity, do you use dynamic index buffers to accomplish the geomipmapping, or do you just trample the vertex buffers every frame?
Incredibly impressive. I, like you, began my first endeavor into learning JS by building a GUI. Unlike you, my resulting product was ugly as sin. This is seriously awesome work.
That's very cool. Nicely polished, that's a lot of hard work and effort. Congrats! I can relate to your story of building the UI framework yourself. That's kinda what I ended up doing myself too, and I've learned a lot of fundamentals through that approach.
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Thank you! I'm the guy who made it. It's very nice hearing these words from you. I remember checking out your blog many times in the past :)
Woah, I just realized that you draw the entire GUI by yourself. Don't get me wrong, that's pretty awesome in itself, I've done things like that myself. But I'd like to suggest (or perhaps inquire) why you wouldn't just overlay some html?
Joking aside, it didn't start as a fully-fledged UI. Some scrolling text strings to show a message log first, the ability to move them out of the way later, then implementing a proper window container for them, then introducing the concept of a 'widget', then getting really excited and thinking about a layout system to be able to present multiple widgets per window... that's the way it usually goes :) The GUI turned out a lot more demanding than the terrain engine itself, both in development time as well as rendering load.
In the end, it's all about learning!
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> depending on who you ask Yeah. Personally, lens flare drives me nuts. It's like instagram - you can show me a perfect picture, but instead you're applying a can't-see-shit filter.
It's actually an interesting debate: is it more believable, from the perspective of immersion, that A) the player is a character actually in the world that they're navigating. or B) that they're controlling a character with a video camera. If you frame it that way, I think B is more believable, because it accounts for the television/monitor, the controller, and the general fact that the player doesn't experience any…
Lens flare in photography and videography tends to be seen as a defect and something to be avoided. That's why lenses have use expensive chemistry for anti-reflective coatings.
When lens flare is used it should be a conscious choice.
Lens flare tends to be reserved for scenes in space. And most of these scenes are not real, but created in a computer, and the flare is added to create "realness". Well, that's fine. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's mocked. ('NEEDS MOAR LENS FLARE' has some useful web search results.)
But, for games, I tend to like lens flare, and it tends to help immersion. (If used carefully.) I have no idea why. It's probably a good idea to allow users to turn it on or off.
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> depending on who you ask Yeah. Personally, lens flare drives me nuts. It's like instagram - you can show me a perfect picture, but instead you're applying a can't-see-shit filter.
It's actually an interesting debate: is it more believable, from the perspective of immersion, that A) the player is a character actually in the world that they're navigating. or B) that they're controlling a character with a video camera. If you frame it that way, I think B is more believable, because it accounts for the television/monitor, the controller, and the general fact that the player doesn't experience any…
If someone is going to start to nitpick about the unreality of B versus A, then they ought to also address the lack of a dynamic focus and changine depth of field that our visual system handles so automatically that we are unaware that it is even happening and that CG doesn't do this.
Cool demo. What caught my attention was this line in the description: >The terrain is procedural, generated offline by a Delphi program (Delphi is a modern version of Pascal). Nowadays I very rarely see new projects use Object Pascal or Delphi. This is somewhat disappointing since I think it really is a fine language that could be a viable alternative to C++ and Java due to its combination of high performance and cle…
On the other hand, the object system has some nice features. I miss AfterConstruction and BeforeDestruction in other languages, and I like virtual constructors.
This looks great and that is a huge amount of effort. I have to ask about what I think is the elephant in the room: Surely you must have noticed that all your mountains are chopped off at the exact same altitude? Wouldn't the scene look way better if you just increased the maximum, with basically no effort? It's as though you spent a month painstakingly mixing 64 channels of crystal clear audio, but, right at the end…
Very good question! Actually, I can't increase the maximum without going to two bytes per elevation. All of the (top) plateaus are at a height equivalent to 255. Q: OK, why not put them a bit lower than that, with some variety between peaks? A: I already have. If you take a closer look, you will notice that there is another layer of flat surfaces, lower than the top. Q: I'm not convinced. Why only two layers of 'flat…