PD - Alpha Environment (1/3) news - Pulsedrive

At the moment we are heading straight to finish Pulsedrive Alpha and therefore we polish the already created content and focus the [w]tech to-do-list on it, as you can see here. We decided to make separated themes for tracks and environment and combine them later. An early version of our fist environment is already shown in the background of [w]techportal or in the head of our ModDB page. Now we have improved the boards and we want to give you some more detailed overview.

>>Cube-Board

Main idea of this "cube-boards" are their variability. We have tried different settings, but I think there is much potential left, particular in combination with other objects.

In our old tests we used only the lighting system of [w]tech to illuminate the area around every single glowing cube. The framerate was quite good, thanks to Light-Pre-Pass, but somehow it is nonsense to have 200 dynamic lights in the scene which can be replaced by completely static lighting which is independ from the artists idea about the world, too. Only the color should be adjustable dynamically. Therefore we have decided to bake the lightmap for all three glowing cubes on every "cube - board" in three lightmaps per board which are saved together with Ambient-Occlusion in a RBGA texture, which is saved as a DDS file with DXT5 compression in the package. So this is a simple and efficient solution, because for the 22 different boards we need only 30mb at all and there is nearly no real time processing necessary but what is done anyway.

Here we have combined some boards to a small environment: