I've added a 'fog of war' effect to hide areas of the map that have not yet been explored by the player. A grey scale texture contains the data of which areas have been explored, and then this is fed into the terrain shader to darken the areas which are yet to be explored. I'm quite happy with the effect, although objects and trees tend to 'pop' in and I'd rather put a fading in effect as they become visible.
I've also modified the building animation, so a 'scaffold' model is erected first, then the building and then the scaffold descends again. This makes it easier to see where the building is being built, and the progress of its construction.
The last thing visible in this post is the GUI that I have started implementing. The selected units or building are displayed across the bottom of the screen, and their actions are available along the left side of the screen. The minimap is displayed on the bottom left side of the screen.
Below is a video to show the effects mentioned:
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Walking animation
I've been working on the walking animation for my characters and created a short video which I uploaded to youtube to demonstrate:
I've not yet textured the model (just a standard checkerboard texture) but the animation is quite smooth and I'm happy with the polygon count (currently 144 polygons). The model is quite square looking around some areas but this shouldn't be too noticeable in-game as the camera will be viewing character models from a fairly long distance.
The models are going to be animated in-game by using several key frames and linearly interpolating vertex positions on the GPU. Each key frame will be stored as a standard .OBJ file and an XML file will reference which frames are used in which animations etc. Although this won't achieve as nice looking results as a proper skeletal animation system, it is far easier to code and will scale quite nicely with large numbers of characters on screen.
Once I have implemented the animation system I will be moving on to the pathfinding logic.
I've not yet textured the model (just a standard checkerboard texture) but the animation is quite smooth and I'm happy with the polygon count (currently 144 polygons). The model is quite square looking around some areas but this shouldn't be too noticeable in-game as the camera will be viewing character models from a fairly long distance.
The models are going to be animated in-game by using several key frames and linearly interpolating vertex positions on the GPU. Each key frame will be stored as a standard .OBJ file and an XML file will reference which frames are used in which animations etc. Although this won't achieve as nice looking results as a proper skeletal animation system, it is far easier to code and will scale quite nicely with large numbers of characters on screen.
Once I have implemented the animation system I will be moving on to the pathfinding logic.
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