Version 0.05,
With Biolabs main core mechanics coming along nicely i figured it was time to begin working on the setting. A lot has changed in this version so i will just make a list of whats happened.
- Created a basic map, underground science facility.
- Added a tileset to support the map making process.
- New Lighting Engine supports Omni, Environmental Effects, Pulsating, Orbital, Flickering coloring and basic ambient occlusion. You can see this in effect on the Computer screens in the top right and the project board left of that. also on the hibernation pod on the left and surrounding each enemy for visibility. lights are animated and will gently pulse in and out for screens, stay static for monsters and flicker for lights that are about to die etc.
- Glass Jars can be placed around the map these are physics objects and when shot explode laving glass shards. they also randomly choose they’re own sprite at run time so the level editor does not need to pick from 8 different jars to place you simply place one and it will pick the image its self.
- Office Plants, work the same as glass jars this is an inherited property they pick they’re own image from a selection of 8 and share a common anchor point so they always ’fit’ in the level
- Real time blood splatters. this is the most unique feature of them all. when an enemy is destroyed a blood splatter controller object is placed on the floor. this then takes n = (3 * Enemy_Size) + (Random * 2), blood splatter images from a collection of about 20 32×32 sized blood splatters and overlaps them at random rotations, scales and positions around the death point of the object then 1 or 2 of those blood splatters is scaled slowly to give the effect of ‘pooling’ this allows for potentially over 100,000 different blood splatter effects each animating uniquely per instance while barely consuming any resources at all.
Finally after performance testing and basic optimization the project still maintains over 1000fps on my Desktop PC and 2011 13” Mac Book
Over 650fps on my IPhone 5
and over 300fps on a HTC Salsa (Crappy old android phone running 2.2)
I am using the HTC Salsa phone as my benchmark for performance. as long as the game maintains 100 fps on the salsa i consider my headroom for features and performance heavy tasks to be okay. once all of the core mechanics and features are maintained on the HTC Salsa i will begin my 2nd round of optimizations and then see how much headroom we have left for implementing say higher quality lights etc.
With this build most of my time was spent working on my first run through of polish i will now begin working on the game levels and implementing mechanics to drive story.
