My voxel renderer now has the capability to overlay everything with any texture I want. I'm using it on a new set of interconnected winter levels. This way I don't have to manually come up with a frosty version of each texture.
Without giving away too much, this week I built a new system that has implications for both puzzle solving and movement mechanics.
I also went back to several levels and fiddled with lighting again. Basically 90% of my development time is spent adjusting colors. Before / after:
Clearly, the old version relied heavily on bloom. I'm trying to avoid that a bit more now. Bloom is like crack cocaine to game developers.
Other random things:
- When you walk off an edge, there is now a split second of forgiveness during which you can still jump. Just filing down another edge to make player movement less frustrating.
- I finally killed an old glitch that subconciously annoyed me for years. Lemma has "bullet time", and up until this week it stuttered noticeably when running in slow-motion, despite maintaining a high framerate. I peeked into the BEPUPhysics source code and realized it runs on a fixed timestep with an accumulator. It updates at 60 FPS regardless of the actual framerate. So when I changed the time scale, that 60 FPS dropped to 30 FPS. But no more! I now scale BEPUPhysics' target framerate as well, and the result is silky smooth slow motion.
- I liked using Jekyll for my blog so much, I also migrated the Lemma website, and updated it in the process. The site was already hosted on S3 so half the work was already done.
That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!
Mirrored on my blog
Do you change the physics timestep only when in bullet time parkour-time, or did you change it even when not running in slow-mo? Just curious. =)