A Shiny new Background blog - ZeppelinStudio

Posted in Engine Programming | Nov 5, 2012 | by Phil­ipp Schä­fer – Engine Pro­gramming

After quite some time it is a plea­sure to once again reveal some engine-related infor­ma­tion. The gap in our blog­ging mainly resul­ted from the great amount of work done on the core of the engine, which unfor­t­u­na­tely didn’t bring forth many awe­some pic­tures to show off.
The most nota­ble impro­ve­ments are:
• Bet­ter code manage­ment, resul­ting in a more sta­ble game
• More effi­ci­ent use of our resour­ces, which for instance allows fast reso­lu­tion chan­ges
• Impro­ved com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the gra­phics hard­ware to allow fas­ter imple­men­ta­tion of effects in the future
These bene­fits are cur­rently brought to use in the rea­liza­tion of our new art con­cept.
Our brand new scene back­ground is clea­rer, more per­for­mant and fran­kly more beau­ti­ful and will be the topic of the fol­lo­wing lines. To enable it, nearly 90 per­cent of the old code has been thrown away.

The first pic­ture shows the start of the ren­de­ring for the new con­cept. In the fol­lo­wing image you can see the first imple­men­ta­tion of back­ground water reflec­tions. The strange appearance of the image is cau­sed by the aim to ren­der addi­tio­nal infor­ma­tion, which is hel­pful for tes­ting. The third pic­ture in this blog post finally shows last week’s state, when we sent our sub­mis­sion to the IGF Stu­dent com­pe­ti­tion.
The core fea­tures are the new hori­zon, the color of the sky, the reflec­ting water sur­face in the back­ground and the flow from front to back. The water in the fore­ground is now also kept in its boun­da­ries, flowing around islands and sur­ging onto the shore.
I am very much loo­king for­ward to pre­sen­ting the effects added for each dif­fe­rent color in my next blog post…