LinsenBlog

Suddenly a sky-renderer! How awesome it!? Believe it or not, this didn't take long to implement due to the awesome amount of code and explanations provided in this web article on atmospheric sky rendering. The hardest part was actually figuring out how the rest of my team did rendering so that my render pass didn't mess anything up.

I chose a poor time to write this blog update as I don't have the time to commit to actually writing a step-by-step tutorial outlining how I did this, but maybe I'll come back and update it.

Here's the basics:

1. Disable OpenGL's depth testing with glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
2. Prepare a textured quad (a.k.a. a square) to be rendered as the first thing after you call glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
3. Render that quad using the sky shaders you build from the above tutorial.
4. Re-enable depth testing so the rest of your scene doesn't go kaput: glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);

Easy right? (It will honestly take some work, but as you can see it's oh-so-worth it).

Cheers until next time!

WOOP. Here's the first of many devblogs for my CPE 476 project! And by many I mean probably like 3.

The game

I should probably mention some details about the game before I go rambling off about what I've put into it so far. RBGZero is a hybrid of a few game types. The controls and 'track' come from Audiosurf, the feel and speed of the game from the F-Zero series, and a small rhythm game basis inspired by Audiosurf, Thumper, and the BIT.TRIP series. We're hoping to combine these together to create a pseudo-on-rails racer that pits you against your reflexes and your ability to predict rhythm patterns in music. The goal: travel as far as you can before the song/track ends while avoiding and also destroying obstacles. RGB comes from the fact that there are 3 colored lanes that give your ship 3 different colored shields as you race. Hitting a similar colored obstacle will destroy it and give you a speed boost. Obstacles are timed with the background music, so feeling the rhythm of the song is key for traveling far distances. That's about it.

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Shadows

So each member of my team was assigned a 'major technology' to implement in our game. I unwisely chose shadow maps. I say this not because understanding how to do shadow maps was incredibly hard (though it took a few readings), but because our codebase was not initialized to handle multiple render passes with different shaders and steps very well. Thus, IMPLEMENTATION was what made this super hard. I basically followed the tutorial here and un-saddened as much of the codebase as I could to get the result you see at the top of this post. There is still a good amount of shadow acne when the camera is moved around and some peter-panning is also present, but I think they look pretty good! Now that that's taken care of, it's time to make a BeatMap reader and object spawner!