25052020

Got a lot of progress done today although not on the printer: I got distracted shortly after I woke by the sound of the brook in my backyard and decided instead to work on environmental stuff. Amongst the number of additions I made, the two most interesting ones in my opinion are:

+ The implementation of a subtle darkening effect at night which causes objects to appear darker the farther Avery is from them (along with the re-implementation of a very old shadow system that I disabled almost a year ago in favour of the current one, but which works well with the aforementioned effect to produce a kind of harsh lighting appropriate to torchlight). This alone took me several hours of what I now realise to be effectively pointless work sifting through forums trying to figure out how to pass a texture to a shader. After maybe the fifth hour or so I finally decided to give up and just use surfaces instead. Initially I’d avoided doing it because I feared that creating a new surface for each sprite of every piece of flora would have destroyed the performance; well, I should’ve just tested it directly from the start because my assumption turned out to be basically negligible at the end of the day.

+ The addition of fog, which previously I’d just handled via an overlay but which now also includes in-world cloud objects which have their own depth and gradually move across the screen. I’ve also tied in the overlay’s degree (ie how much it occludes the screen) to the number of cloud instances on screen at once, meaning the overlay will now dynamically adjust itself based on how dense the coverage is. It’s not perfect yet as I still want to adjust the depth a bit more to produce better consistency but it turned out looking much better than I’d initially expected.