10-16-13 - Valchion Update - GLSL Lighting

Hello! It's been awhile since my last post. I apologize for just disappearing, but life found a way, haha. I've been working on Valchion for the past few weeks, and before that, Sustain.


I'm going to try posting here more often, so that may mean smaller, more bite-sized posts to help me get through them. So, I've done quite a bit with Valchion so far.

I've started moving it over to GLSL (still in the Blender Game Engine) to give it better lighting and dynamic shadows. I thought it might be more efficient than having my own lighting system that needed to be rendered and updated every frame, but that may or may not be the case, as I'm seeing. :S

The lighting really does make the colors pop, though, which is good. I've also implemented a pixellation filter that makes the game look like it was rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled. It can be triggered off and on in the options menu, which is nice.

I've also changed the bullets back to being just ray-casts, to give that quick and sharp-feeling action back to the game.

One thing that moving to GLSL mode did was make the loading take waaaay too long, so I've changed the way the game worked as far as maps. Previously, there were several maps in a scene (or zone, in a sense), and Blender would load up the scene, and then transfer you to an individual map.

Now, the maps are all hidden in an inactive scene, and the current map is loaded in. When you need to go to another map, it deletes the current map and loads in another. This process reduces the load time jumping between zones, since it's not loading maps that it doesn't use.

Anyway, it's nice, but as you can see in the screen above, the game's eating up my graphics card, which isn't great considering how little I actually have going on so far. I suppose it'll take some more diagnosing to figure out exactly where the issue lies with this.

Thanks for reading!