Hey folks,
So I'm still away from the design doc, and will be tomorrow, too. I've been a bit under the weather, Keith has had some personal life stuff, Blue has been not so hot as well... fun times.
Overall my own slowness has mostly come from a desire to really nail things with the ships and battlefield look right from the start. I've been focused on the planet and nebula backgrounds first, and looking at a form of lines to denote the plane the ships are on without being too distracting, and figuring out how I can do all of this with minimal GPU usage despite having a lot of variance possible.
Oh, and the camera for moving around in this, too. I'd originally planned on just static views in the tech demo, but that wouldn't really give the right approach.
Oh, and I've been working on various things for recoloring and looking at different approaches with shaders (some from the asset store, some of my own that I'm creating fresh) and so forth to see what is most efficient. Been learning about HDR in Forward rendering mode, too, which is new to me -- I was going to avoid HDR, but things just look so blah without it. But there are some MSAA issues with HDR in Forward rendering apparently, although I'm not sure if those still apply if you're using tonemapping; information on that is surprisingly hard to find.
I could always go full deferred shading, but then we're entirely software-side for AA, and I'm not thrilled about that. I'm not going to be making use of the awesome lighting characteristics of deferred shading, so that seems like wasted overhead in general.
Anyway, I really
love this sort of work, and it's going smashingly, but I'm in general trying to condense what would usually be multiple weeks of work into a couple of days, and it's taking me slightly longer than I thought it might.
Oh, one of the other big slowdowns was simply examining toolsets for things like the uv mapping work. I was hoping to save Blue and myself time in the long term with that, but I'm not sure that will be possible with the current types of tools.
Also been looking at things for setting up in-game cinematics, which I'll also be using for the kickstarter trailer. Oh, and stuff for rendering out short gif clips, since that's a big deal for kickstarters, too.
I guess in some ways I'm actually not behind, heh. I had just planned on working on ship shading and figured I could do that in two days or so. Instead I've been working on all of the above, and have answers to a lot of it already figured out, or fairly advanced. All of those things kind of intersect one another to some degree, so I've been working on them kind of in rotation and they should all come together about the same time into something coherent.
Anyhow, I should have some things to show tomorrow.
