Graphics

[The Camo]

Yeah, you've mentioned that you hate the night system and want to redo it.  Any chance you have plans for what you're going to do with it, or just make it better somehow?

[Jonny]

Right now it puts a transparent layer of blue over the map to give it a "night" effect.  I would rather find a way to make it "turn down" the brightness of the tiles (or something similar).  I am looking into some DirectX stuff.

[The Camo]

what exactly do you mean by "turn down the brightness". If it's fade to black couldn't you just do what pixel shaders do and multiply the red green and blue by a certain amount below 1 to darken it? otherwise I'm not quite sure what you mean.

[Jonny]

I'm not that great with graphics programming, so I'm not exactly sure how I am going to do it.  I'll figure something out.  (I am good at figuring things out.  )

[The Camo]

What I'm talking about with the RGB values is something like this: Each color has its RGB value, between 0 and 1 I think, and these values are what defines the color. Black has 0 for all its RGB values, and White has 1 for all of them, but for example, pure red has 1 for its red value, and 0 for everything else. If you wanted to darken a color, but not change it, you would multiply each of the RGB values by a certain amount, if you wanted it half as bright you would multiply them all by 0.5. Now for example if you wanted the pure red, but a value of 1 for red was too bright, you multiply the entire thing by, we'll say 0.5. Since the other values are already 0, they don't change, but the red is now half as bright. Hope this helps.

Also, I heard you talking about changing shadows, this might be able to work for that too.

[DELTA]

to much to read, aaaaaah!

:kills self:

[The Camo]

to much to read, aaaaaah!

:kills self:

*uses necromancer skills to make a DELTAzombie*

yeah, I was reding up on 3D graphics in hopes of making my own engine, but found out it involved lots of math, more than I care to learn during summer break. I did learn a bunch about light maps and pixel shaders and surface shaders though

[Trainmaster]

Nice, Camo.

[Jonny]

The values are between 0 and 255.  I tried subtracting 100 from each value.  It looked really good, but my FPS went down to 0 and I could see the screen refreshing. 

[The Camo]

yeah, ok, I guess I was thinking between 1 and 0 because that's the value my RGB finding function returns, but yeah, the multiplying by a decimal will still work. And yeah, it's really CPU intensive, which is why they have pixel shader circuits for it instead of using the computer RAM and the CPU

[Jonny]

How do you use a pixel shader?

[The Camo]

As far as I know, they come on your graphics card, don't ask me how to use them, because I'm not sure myself.

[Jonny]

I'll search around.  Thanks.

[The Camo]

No problem, glad I could make a suggestion worth checking out.

[The Camo]

I don't remember seeing many ruined stone building tiles, if they're there I may have missed them, or just don't remember them. If we're going to have swampy ruins, they could very well come in handy, if you're still thinking about new tileset tiles.