IBL in AI War 2!

[x4000]

https://blog.arcengames.com/ibl-in-ai-war-2/

[BadgerBadger]

Cool! I think the new visuals will be neat, especially once we get the squads flying around. And hopefully it will be easy to get the IBL-magic done on future models.

I'm kinda curious what Keith has been up to. Is he going to drop anything large on us before the weekend? Or is it more long term work?

[x4000]

Keith was going to drop the objectives screen on you, but we ran into issues with the sizing of GUI elements.  Mainly for text inside them, but that led into us having to explore some ways to really efficiently do some of the complex GUI stuff in a resolution-independent way.  The new uGUI from unity 4.6 and onwards is supposed to be able to handle that itself, but the problem comes with GUIs that are too large and maleable.  In some cases, letting unity handle the sizing itself made my framerate drop from 200+ fps to 25fps.  All CPU-side, not a GPU thing.

So that led to more research on why it has those issues, and how we can avoid triggering unity having them.  It's not a crisis, but we wanted to take the best approach and go ahead and have that in from early on -- before we start trying to make things pretty, etc - and that slowed us down a bit.  Well within buffer for the project, but it was an unexpected speedbump yesterday leading into today.

[eRe4s3r]

I really like how all those graphics features come together to create a unique visually pleasing style Now the explosion and combat effects need to match that, and I foresee great visually impressive battles coming ;P

Btw, are explosion effects going to influence that new ship texture shader? Light shading/light/fake illu or something?

[x4000]

Thank you!

And yep, the combat effects have a long way to go, but I know what I want to do with them.  They're extremely placeholder-y right now.  I'm also excited to later get into the audio side of this and make the combat sound awesome, as well as giving some of the larger ships really neat ambient hums, etc.

In terms of explosions and whatnot causing lighting shifts, unfortunately that would be far too great a hit on most all machines.  It might be something that I can set up as an option for machines that can handle it.  But I think that some of the reflection work may already catch it anyway.  Having the lighting of explosions interact with ships wouldn't be HARD, it's just a matter of the fact that it's then doing pixel lighting on ships.  Possibly I can force those to be vertex lights and then it's less of a big deal.  And again, something that people can turn off, etc.

I'll put a note to look into it, at least.  It was one of my favorite things about explosions and even shots in Raptor.  Definitely can't do that with shots here, heh.  Things like lightning effects aside.