Here’s a peek at the base terrain for the Apricot world. As it stands now, the dimensions are around 3km by 3km. Platform objects like slabs of rock and other terrain features are being created separately. Feedback is welcome but will be totally ignored, because I’m an artist and can’t handle criticism. No, if anyone has any ideas, of course we’d love to hear them, especially at this stage and especially about terrain. Although more comments about apricot rocket launcher cheat codes will still be considered.

To create the terrain, I started by painting a pretty simple black and white height map in Gimp and then applied it to a subdivided plane through the displacement modifier in Blender. After modifying the height map a bit to produce a result that was good enough to work with, I applied the filter and then used sculpting for then on. It had taken a few attempts to figure out an efficient technique to create a massive chunk of terrain while still having a decent amount of control over the proportions, which was extremely important and difficult in this case considering the main character(Frankie) is only like half of a meter long.

This week we’ll be working on texturing this with splatting and getting it all into Crystal Space. Also below is some concept art.

Ever have one of those weeks ?

Yes. Thats true… It’s real shame to say this but someone broke into our network… I still can’t believe… but slow down… let me explain everything….

1) I’m sure that someone other than me was accessing my email account. It was highly secured by my outlook, so I have no idea how it was possible…

2) Still I couldn’t believe it, but finally they send an email to us with proof:

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Here a few words what I’ve been doing (less) recently. In the general, I worked on the render manager, and more specifically, I did some work on the postprocessing system.

Using post processing is quite simple, even for Crystal Space. In the implementation of a render manager, you need some boilerplate to declare and setup the manager:

// A class member for the manager
CS::RenderManager::PostEffectManager postEffects;
// Initialization
postEffects.Initialize (objectReg);


That’s it, you’re ready to add post processing effects.
(Note: While I’m talking about setting up post processing effects from code throughout this article, I’m aware that for practical purposes there should be a way to set things up from some sort of configuration file. Be patient.)

Now a simple example for postprocessing. But even before that, as a simple reminder, the “baseline” image without effects:

This is just a shot from the miniscule graphics prototype level shown before, nothing new here.

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We are very happy to welcome next week Pablo Vazquez from Argentina, better known as VenomGFX, the master of insane colors and crazy animals! He will arrive tuesday and work here for at least three months as artist and animator on the Apricot game.

Pablo will replace Qareeb, who – for personal reasons – went back to Canada… we wish him all the best!

-Ton-

Blender is the best 3d modelling program on the world. But that’s well known. What about the level editor ? Horrible 🙂 So slowly we’re trying to fit this tool into the gamedev world. Many people experienced problems with navigation on big game levels. Now we have kind of zooming tool which translates our camera to a desired point in a space. On this movie you can see difference between solid and textured mode which additionally respects alpha and face normal direction. So update svn and SHIFT-B your Blender ! 🙂
Download theora ogg version here