Latest Gratuitous Space Battles 2 developer blog November 28, 2014 cliffski Me showing some new stuff, and talking about some stuff…enjoy!
Shouldn’t clouds provide some form of “stealthiness” to the ships “buried” within them? Some kind of temporary tactical advantage…
The shield support beam would look better with reduced max opaqueness and have it shimmer around the entire ship but so that the shimmer quickly ends up almost entirely transparent near the middle. It would be even better if it wasn’t totally uniform – ie. fluctuated a bit. The pulsing rate could reflect of the current effectiveness- thouch I think the pulsing looks a bit cheap – it would look better if instead of uniform pulsing it would pulse at random areas of the effect. I haven’t done any gfx programming but I could imagine having some sort of wrapped texture moving over a cylinder, then changing the rate of the movement and map the cylinder into the shape of the desired effect. No idea how to implement that in a shader.
In the blue beam I would add some sort of noise that affects the transparency – it looks a bit too clean. Even better if the cone of the beam was over size and then faded to entirely transparent quickly near the edges.