100 Day Challenge [Days 1-10]

On By Alex_ADEdge

The first 10 days are complete!

Total dev time: 16h 30mins

dogeDIG:

Some good progress with dogeDIG over the first 10 days, Ive solved a few tricky bugs/issues and continued working on a core feature/goal: Revamping the digging mechanic.

This current digging mechanic work ties into several other features with the terrain system and debugging tools so its been a bit of work and likely wont be ticked off the list for another week or two. But it will be a big step in many features being ticked off the list once its done.

Along with progress on digging I also got my splash screen imported and setup (from an older project originally) with a new level manager script and cross-scene fade effect. Heres the splash screen, looking nice and slick:

So the ‘Roadmap to Alpha’ progress after 10 days has bumped up a bit at least with ~6/25 tasks completed:

Shader Dev: Wind Shader

Its been a while since I worked with shaders so I started out simple with a vertex displacement shader to simulate some wind effects (for a flag or sail etc). I really just needed to recap with something basic + rewatch a bunch of intro to shader videos.

Breakdown of my process creating a basic wind shader:

Wind shader 01 – Simple colour output
  1. I started out with the simple colour shader, with at least some UV texture support. Bare basics, but a good place to get back into shader code.
Wind shader 02 – Simple vertex displacement (wibbly wobbly)

2. Adding some vertex displacement, using a sin wave function over time, controlled by an amplitude and frequency variable.

Wind shader 03 – Flag model, UV texture, vertex displace

3. Upgrading to a flag model, with texture. The effect is shown better but theres an issue: the upper vertices are moving where they should be pinned down.

Wind shader 04 – Gradient visualized

4. Some brainstorming later I figured that a gradent would be best to multiply the effect as a ‘magnitude’. Upper vertexes (visualized black) will have zero vertex displacement/wind effect. Lower verts have full vertex displacement.

Wind shader 05 – Bringing it all together + shadow pass
Wind shader 06 – Dialing up the wind

5. Applying the gradient as a magnitude for vertex displacement brings the effect together – wind! I added a shadow pass here as well (not as simple as I hoped) and a ‘random flicker’ displacement when the wind effect is high which adds a bit more randomness to the movement.

Theres a few other things Id like to add, like better lighting/shading, the ability to recieve shadows and maybe a bit more of a natural/random movement. But thats all I had time for & these are things I’ll sort out in the next shaders I work on anyway.

/end