Shady Tree and his Acorns

"Shady Tree, we just adored your act!" Yup, I've spent the evening (and early morning) working on some fun new shaders for the game. Firstly, I was really unhappy with the state of the central star. The glare was too heavy, and there was no texturing at all. This was mainly due to the fact that I was dreading writing a shader for it, with all kinds of funky plumes and glow and all sorts and I had no idea where to start. Happily, as usual, I'm not the first person to come up against this particular shader challenge. Following a little research, I decided on the following approach:

Make a nice "main" sun texture, which will form the basis of the rest of our texture work. This will be used as a) the texture for the raw sphere of the star, and b) the colour map for a shader-rendered texture which takes a new alpha channel from 2 other texture files. Basically all three textures are clouds or difference clouds from Photoshop, the alpha textures getting some level tweaks. Render the main sphere, with just the "vanilla" texture, followed by the 2 rendered textures which are rotated indepentently round 2 axis. These form structured, semi-transparent shells around the main sphere. All this is rendered to a 2D texture, which I when put a very subtle bloom post effect on. Not too heavy, because this gives us a lovely, cartoony sun:

These two are from this evening's build. This has really added something nice to the game, and is well in keeping with the appearance of the planets and other ships. Great fun.

Having dealt with the sun, I wondered if something similar would be good for shield "hit" effects, so I knocked together 3 more textures, this time in blue and with finer detail in the alpha source images. It's pretty tough to capture an image of this effect, becuase you're normally mid-dogfight. To get this one I had to go buy a rear-mounted laser and keep the enemy just behind me while firing. Eventually I got his number.The effect leaps into life and then cools down smoothly, the alpha levels slowly dropping. The alpha layers also revolve in this version of the effect, but much faster than the ones on the sun. A really nice, simple, quick shader which has solved two problems I'd been worrying about for ages. It looks great in standard def, and amazing in high-def. The bloom is a little lower for this one too. Sorry about the state of the skybox background - I seem to have forgotten what order the faces go on the cube :0\

No major changes to the onboard computer code, but I have recoded the police ships in to their own class, and improved the missile launch AI of the enemies. Had some massive scraps this evening - the gameplay balance is getting tighter and tighter. Soon it'll be a perfect fit :0)

Anyways, away to bed - it's half three in the morning man! Chop chop!