Category: gsb2

This has taken me all today and part of yesterday to get working. And no it isn’t final, and no, it isn’t optimized yet. And yes, it probably should have been easier. That little asteroid is occluding the bloom flare from that engine. You can see the non-occluded one above. Took me ages, and about a million lines of code. Arrrghhh. Click to enlarge…

I’ve spent the last day or three experimenting with various visual effects for GSB 2. This is kinda fun, but I also think its quite productive. If i was making the game using Unity or some other engine, I’d just pop along to the asset store and browse the effects other people have written and bung them in. Job done, ship the game.

I can see why a lot of people are attracted to doing that, but personally I’ve found rolling my own solutions to be much more rewarding, not just as a coding geek, but from a game design and visuals POV. The lighting effects in GSB 2 will not be the standard Unity effects, or the same effects used in any other engine, ever. they are unique to the game. They may not be ‘radically different’, but I think the distinctiveness helps. Sometimes i end up coming up with pretty wacky solutions to problems which allow me to include features in an unusual way. I think it’s a really good thing for different coders to be approaching each problem in a different way, after all we are supposed to be creating original, and distinct works of ‘art’.

When big movies add special effects, they don’t often copy and paste effects from other films. Arguably Star Wars has already done ‘lasers’ so you could theoretically just copy them. The problem is, you never get innovation that way.

I just watched ‘The Forbidden Planet’, a classic 1950s sci fi movie. it was the first sci-fi movie to have an all electronic soundtrack, which was amazing at the time. It’s cheesy as hell now. I bet one of the reasons for it’s success is how different it sounded as a result. they had to work out how to do that from scratch. Then sci fi movies all tended to sound the same and become tedious until Star Wars, when George Lucas decided classical music could work with a futuristic movie. Now, ALL movies copy that idea.

It would have been easier, simpler, and cheaper, and much more in line with what the audience expected if those innovations had not happened. But when they get it right, they get it right big time. I doubt that GSB 2 will change the future of gaming, but I like to think that by occasionally approaching things from first principles and hacking my own way to make things happen, I’m at least ensuring there is some variety in the way stuff looks.

BTW… On the topic of Robby the robot, what a flipping layabout! He is , if you read-between-the-lines a nightmare to work with. First he does this whole ‘Sorry I was giving myself an oil-job’ excuse (yeah whatever), when he can’t be found when called, then he mocks and sounds incredibly put-out because he is asked to make a new dress. then later, he tells the crew ‘if you need anything, use the beamer’ without ever explaining where or what that is. Plus he moves at about the pace of a snail. if I didn’t know better I’d think he did that deliberately so everyone got sick of asking robby to do something and did it themselves.

‘if you need anything in about 6 hours, use the beamer, otherwise you might as well do it yourself’.

Bah.

So I’m working on various stuff I’m not talking about yet for GSB 2, and I ended up with the image below. All looks fine, it’s a ship nicked temporarily from GSB 1, with some tweaks, and I found a bug. The bug is a bit of a pain, and it’s those 2 little axillary engines in the middle towards the bottom. Those engine glows are not supposed to be there, they are supposed to be under the ship.

But they aren’t.

And I could fix this really easily, but actually, it is kinda cool. I mean…why *shouldn’t* i have a few ships with engines that sit above other elements of a ship? the more creative freedom the artists have the better right? and that way the glow from the engines will illuminate the ship ‘fins’ in dark battles. It will look cool. It also means a shedload of irritating fiddling with code that already looks like a psychotic kitten has had a panic attack in a spaghetti factory.

but hey, I’ve trained myself never to think like that. If it makes the game better, I’m going to commit to supporting it, even if it makes life awkward for me. Expect this game to ship sometime this millennium…