Last week we got all the animals actually in the game and fixed some issues ( like tiles not beeing animated properly ), to be ready to make a new showcase video about the different biomes. We added support for water and flying NPCs ( for fishes and ambiant birds ).
We added cliffs at last, to avoid the black hole beneath terrain tiles when there was too much height difference.
Also made my first basic shader. A really basic brightness and color balancing shader to change the tint and light depending on climates. Its now part of a really basic “post process” with a vignette effect and a “sun halo” to add atmosphere when zooming out. It mainly makes a difference in sunny climates ( arid and desert ) , that are now brighter and tinted in yellow.
Yes the worldmap looks a bit static now, compared to region views.
The crow flying above the ground looks great. Maybe you could use a similar process to add some clouds wandering above the world map (they would appear after zooming out to a specific height) but this is clearly not a top priority.
Okay, I understand now. Thank for the answer Ronchon. 🙂
A shader is just a small program running on the graphics side. It can reajust drawn pixels and all.
What i did is a really basic shader applied to the whole screen, and what it does is roughly the equivalent of the photoshop image balance function ” brightness/contrast ” : it reajusts levels and brightness of the image.
I use this to change brightness and tint depending of the climate, because yes the climates share the same source sprites and all the sprites are rendered with a pretty neutral color and brightness (specially to support later reajustments like this )
This way in a desertic sunny climate, i can brighten everything to make it look more sunny while the same -lets say sand tiles- can be used in nordic beaches and look darker.
If i baked the brightness in the sprites themselves, i would have to duplicate all textures for each climate and it would be a nightmare to maintain, so its better to dynamically control brightness. Also: weather effects, someday maybe.
I’m still learning the real basics of what and how a shader is.
Cliffs !!! Cliffs !! Cliffs !
Hourrah for cliffs !
I’m not sure I understand right about the shader. The tiles wasn’t correctly colored in regard of the climate associated ? Or you reused some tiles in differents climates ? Or you want to use them for something else, like day/night cycle ?
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