Bits of Eight - Day 3

mauve on 2014/05/14 00:08 of Bits of Eight

This evening I spent a few hours trying to fix shader bugs in wasabi-scenegraph. The lighting model was pretty much unmodified from the hastily crafted shaders from the Pyweek 16 entry, with a hasty attempt at specular lighting added on that turns out to be quite buggy. With these bugs fixed objects in the game can be properly glossy. Naturally I'll merge this work back into wasabi-scenegraph after the competition so that everyone can use it next time around. The shader work sucked up a lot of time but I think I understand it better and better the more time I spend on it.

For example, it didn't take long to change the properties of the sail material so that light is transmitted through the sail cloth, so sails now receive diffuse illumination from the reverse.

Our Pyweek 16 and 17 entries depended on Lepton and in both competitions I've found and fixed 64-bit bugs that have made it unusable when compiled on 64-bit architectures. We have a number of different use cases for particle effects in Bits of Eight that will require lepton again. As a C extension, it has always been problematic for users to install. Our "spectator" team member Sal has stepped up to package my 64-bit compatible branch of lepton: the hope is you'll be able to find a suitable binary distribution for various platforms on the PyPI page.

With lepton in hand, I've used it to create wake and bow wave particle effects, so that at last you can see your ship moving:

We still don't have a complete combat model, but the graphics engine is now looking pretty solid.