Tuesday Rocks

Some Shader Success

You will never find a more challenging maze that is the shader coders daily life. Every little dust of wind will affect the output of your shader, and when you are in experimental shader writing mode the problems magnify beyond belief.

I spent most of the day in a pitch battle against thin air for the most part, unable to make contact with anything and not even knowing whether I was winning or not.

Two hours before writing this text I decided to go right back to first principals and get something small working and work my way forwards. The technique worked and I can now sigh a little with my terrain now accepting a shader shadow and rendering alongside my other shaders. Phew!

Mark Art

After my green and white splodge screenshot I have now been banned from posting any more 'developer art'. The idea is that as we get closer to the release, this blog becomes part of the product marketing and we don't want any 'dislikes' or 'misunderstandings' over the final quality of the project.

To that end, I will only post prepared artwork from our esteemed artist Mr Blosser and Mr Peter.  Here is one such sample, a render of some rock which I will attempt to coax into my new terrain shader very soon.

Normal Success

Perhaps I celebrate prematurely but I just got an email from the Terrain Module author with some new source code which solves the normal issues I was experiencing.  Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly this evening and we can get normals updating as the height changes. After my early shader work, I have concluded the normals are vital to the success of our terrain so I am very nervous about checking out the new code!

Signing Off

I would have shown you a sneak peek at the 'decent demo' with a terrain background plus shadowing, but it's not top draw so you will never see that version of it :)  Once we get something stunning, and our QA guy approves it, just maybe, you can have a sneak peek at Reloaded terrain.

More work due this evening, but looking at the clock I seem to have done an 8 hour stint without a break and currently light-headed.  Some food, then more lovely coding!!