2010-09-17, 12:34 PM
The produce look really great. I've personally never liked games with that kind of grass. It looks beaten down / not grass like at all.
I have to caution against using the trees with all those leaves like that. We really need trees that move more in the direction ML was working on.
I hope you "re-skin" the boy so he matches his vegetables texture wise. Please consider customizing the menus too. That sword icon I don't recommend using if only for all the compression artifacts in it.
I've been thinking a bit about the skyline lately. It's a real problem I think the way it's visible even indoors / slices thru the landscape. I recommend making sure your draw distance is always at least as far as the furthest horizon on the map if you're using a sky. Afaik this is a requirement for all games with a skybox type setup.
I've added an option to Ex that decouples the fog from the draw distance, so you can pull the fog closer while keeping a further draw distance. I'm also going to setup a test to see if something is completely in fog so it can be drawn with a very basic shader that just sets the colour to the maximum fog colour. That way you can cap off the sky. And I will add another option to skip drawing non map piece objects altogether when in fog... but if you enable that for your game you want to make sure the skyline is defined by map pieces and not objects/monsters etc. Also consider, if you want a horde-like enemy type. Try to avoid using a soft animation monster, because I reckon Som recomputes the entire mesh of the soft animated models every frame, which can be cpu intensive... especially if their are a ton way off in the distance. Also I suggest keeping soft animated stuff pretty simple / only use complex soft models in boss setups.
In the future I think there will be an option to use very crude models and have Ex replace them with very detailed stuff before they get to the display adapter. Including replacing hard animation monsters with more modern vertex weighted models. Of course your game would not use the crude models by default. Ex would trick it into looking into an alternate directory for the models. And that way Som will never end up being a CPU bottleneck.
I have to caution against using the trees with all those leaves like that. We really need trees that move more in the direction ML was working on.
I hope you "re-skin" the boy so he matches his vegetables texture wise. Please consider customizing the menus too. That sword icon I don't recommend using if only for all the compression artifacts in it.
I've been thinking a bit about the skyline lately. It's a real problem I think the way it's visible even indoors / slices thru the landscape. I recommend making sure your draw distance is always at least as far as the furthest horizon on the map if you're using a sky. Afaik this is a requirement for all games with a skybox type setup.
I've added an option to Ex that decouples the fog from the draw distance, so you can pull the fog closer while keeping a further draw distance. I'm also going to setup a test to see if something is completely in fog so it can be drawn with a very basic shader that just sets the colour to the maximum fog colour. That way you can cap off the sky. And I will add another option to skip drawing non map piece objects altogether when in fog... but if you enable that for your game you want to make sure the skyline is defined by map pieces and not objects/monsters etc. Also consider, if you want a horde-like enemy type. Try to avoid using a soft animation monster, because I reckon Som recomputes the entire mesh of the soft animated models every frame, which can be cpu intensive... especially if their are a ton way off in the distance. Also I suggest keeping soft animated stuff pretty simple / only use complex soft models in boss setups.
In the future I think there will be an option to use very crude models and have Ex replace them with very detailed stuff before they get to the display adapter. Including replacing hard animation monsters with more modern vertex weighted models. Of course your game would not use the crude models by default. Ex would trick it into looking into an alternate directory for the models. And that way Som will never end up being a CPU bottleneck.