Latest EntriesTank Turret Animation
So, the very next step is to have the tanks start firing shells and the rogdors to start hurling rocks. Before I started working on the tank firing, however, I wanted to finish the turret aiming (for obvious reasons). Once that was done I thought I'd give the tanks a bit of personality when they aren't firing. Hopefully projectiles will be finished on Monday. Until then, here's a brand new video of the tank turret animation!
I should also add that I spaced out the dust clouds for the tanks and rogdors a bit, as well as started them all with an alpha value of 0.75 instead of 1.0 (both as suggested). Looks nice.
Comments
8 comments:
Hey Brad that is sweet! Keep it up!
Yeah, it looks just great. You can alter the turret animation though, to make it closer to real tanks turret moving, but these are just details ^_^
I think that the turret movement looks really good. I like the acceleration/deceleration that happens and it just looks good all around.
I'm not a huge fan of the dust clouds though. I think that they just look a little too uniform and spaced out. I think you should either switch back to the old way or if it's possible then you should make the spacing of the dust clouds a little more random. It'd be best if they came out of different areas of the back of the tank at different intervals (and different size clouds would look even better), but I think that it's starting to look really cool.
Hm, did I say that the dust clouds will look much better if there will be two emitters for the tanks? 8)
Thanks! What is really funny about the acceleration/deceleration is that I didn't plan for it! The tank constantly picks a random vector to turn towards, and I guess in a lot of cases, random vectors close together are generated, which result in an acceleration/deceleration effect.
Your points on the dust clouds are all valid. I'll see if I can't introduce some more randomness into things. It does look much better from farther away though (the last video was abnormally close to make the turret animation more apparent), even more-so than the original method. Still, it's really obvious that there is a fixed pattern to the clouds, so your suggestions would definitely help.
I don't think you did, but I agree that it would look better. I've thought of doing it myself. Unfortunately, the cost is pretty high. Each dust cloud is actually a billboard. Since the clouds are semi-transparent, they all have to be sorted so that the ones farther away can be drawn first. It just doesn't look right otherwise. On top of that, too many transparent billboards leads to a fill-rate bottleneck (I've hit that already once before, and had to lower my number of billboards to get the frame rate back up).
It depends much on the camera distance from the units. You can spawn point sprites if camera distance is bigger than x, and spawn billboards when camera distance is smaller than x, and even increase the spawn rate when camera is closer than _x2. If it doesnt requires too much time, you can even make transitions between billboards and point sprites.
Of course, if the camera isnt supposed to be too close to units you can ignore whatever I said above ^_^
That's a very interesting idea. If the camera didn't move very much, that would work really well (because transitions wouldn't be needed). I do expect the camera will move often though, like in normal RTS games, as the user scrolls all around pretty much constantly. That makes transitions between point sprites/billboards a necessity. Otherwise, the user will definitely notice point sprites overlapping in the incorrect order. On top of that, the extra effort of transitioning based on camera distance will probably end up being just as expensive, if not more expensive, than the current billboard sort. I'm afraid in this type of game it won't buy much, if at all.
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