So I started writing the shader for the grass on my terrain generator. So far it uses a shell system, but I'm hoping to incorporate fins to make it look better from up close. It's a 10 pass shader ( CRAZY INEFFICIENT) that renders the base texture blended surface, and 9 separate shells extruded outwards from the mesh. So far it looks good, but I'm still working on making it draw grass in different densities depending on the altitude of the terrain, so that cliffs won't have grass on them.

The good thing about using a shader for drawing blades of grass, is that it doesn't drastically increase the polygon count, and (if written correctly) will look good from any angle, whereas if you were using flat billboard meshes, the blades of grass might be in a perfect line and look flat from the sides.

So I started messing with Unity3d today, and I wrote a nice procedural terrain generation program. It basically creates a 2D array of floats, then subdivides them in a fractal pattern with noise, and then procedurally generates a mesh based on that.

Then I made a lightmap script that will perform a specified number of raycasts on the land, finding the general slope and rendering that to a lightmap.

And lastly, I made a function and a custom shader to compute texture blending based on altitude, render a black and white map of texture transparencies, and use that to combine two different tiling textures seamlessly over the landscape.

I'm working on creating an orthographic projection system so that I can render the shadows of the terrain on objects efficiently. that would basically work by using a multiply shader and altering the vertex color of the geometry of objects in the map. There are a few problems with this however... if an object is airborne, the shadows might still appear. You can see on the top left corner of the picture some error with the lightmap. That part should'nt be shadowed, but it is. I'm still working on it =)

sorry, I just thought it was cool...

It's out, come play it, and vote 5!!!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
472848

I've been working a little in flash again... Seeing how popular these "Storm The House" style defense games are, I decided to make one of my own... It basically consists of a cannon that you control with the mouse, and a bunch of random things flying at you from the right. There are 7 upgradable traits and you can pause the game at any time to buy these. deployable turrets will be included in the near future. This is the result of a weekend's worth of work, and I feel it turned out pretty well... I'm not finished with it yet, but it will probably be finished and playable soon...

Done:
- Upgradable traits including reload rate, max health, fire rate, shell velocity, blast radius, and damage to vehicles.
- 5 different enemies (soon to be more)
- an efficient particle system that can handle hundreds of particles at 30 fps
- efficient shell contrails using only one particle object
- incredibly fast enemy creation... just like the particles you can have a screen full of guys run at 25 frames per second (minimum)
- adjustable quality sliders
- randomly generated animated star background
- UNBEARABLE EPICNESS!

To Do:
- fix error in the enemy arrays... (game still runs fine, there's just a small glitch with object IDs)
- tweak UI
- fix fix some visual defects
- make more different kinds of enemies
- come up with a name =)
- find music...
- add turrets
- tweak cannon attributes

so... I've officially started working on bigger and better things than flash... but I've come out with some cool stuffs... here's a fun demo of some procedural animation I've been working on...

procedural animation test

you need a webplayer to view it... but it's not that bad.

This is basically a demo of balance, it is of a character that will automatically stumble and balance himself when you push him, I thought it was cool...

Apparently, I can draw... (except for faces and hands...) I sketched up this concept art for a character I'm modeling, in around 2 hours, it's not too bad in my opinion... I've never tried drawing anything like this until now, but it seems to have turned out well. If anyone has any tips on drawing faces, give me a call.

Done in Photoshop on a laptop with a trackpad, NO TABLET =)

I've been experimenting with the Unity Game Engine and have been playing with some other tools, I've made this demo here experimenting with realtime mesh deformation...

DeformationDemo
(you need to install a web player to play with it...)

and have been working on car physics for use in a racing game...

I've made this model here for use in the game when I get to the point where it works reasonably well...

I'll get back to Orange Runner 2 soon... but for now... I'm taking a break...

Hey, This is a nice little space for you guys to post all of your bug reports for OR2, because this is the easiest way for me to read them all.

Thanks,

Sorry for the delay, I'm still working on OR2 a little bit... I'm making a death animation, and then the tech demo will be finished, after that, it's just level design and I'll be done! Just keep your pants on!

So, I went back to school today, I'm kinda sad that the Summer's over, and now I'll have significantly less time to spend working on OR2... Just today, I got a buncha homework, which, for some reason took much longer than it should have... So... the development will be slower...

Just thought I should tell you why updates won't come as often anymore....