Normally you only hear about various graphical effect problems and issues regarding 3D engines. In this log I want to highlight a few other problem many 3D engine builder face, but you do not hear about as much.
Multiple Views
This time I have finally implemented the single largest change in design for the new engine – the Viewport. The last engine really only had one world and one camera that could be active for the frame to be rendered and this was something I wanted to change for HPL2.
Render To Texture
One of the things that I am planning to do in this work log is to release a demo showing off a new feature whenever I can. That way I can see how well the engine works on various machines and you readers will also be able to follow the development in a more hands-on fashion!
P sychological
These days in-between projects I spend most of my time doing administrative tasks, writing mails, news and such activities. It’s quite a nice break from the production tasks that are mainly gameplay scripting and audio design, but at times the administrative tasks can be quite scary, even haunting if you so wish.
Texture Atlas
The texture atlas was one of the first thing that I implemented in the engine. It was actually something I started working on the day work started for Energetic, which also means the code is a bit messy 😀 So I decided an update was needed.
HPL 2.0 – The beginning
This is the first post in our brand new Work Log subforum, which is going to act as a sort of blog where we show of how work progress on our upcoming projects! Hope you will enjoy it!
‘Penumbra: Black Plague’ Developer Diary #3 – Screens
One of the main features in Penumbra: Black Plague is the physics. This is a feature that adds a lot of immersion and gives new opportunities for gameplay. However, it has not been without problems to implement it and that is what we will focus on in this diary entry. We will go through some of the different problems we encountered and explain how we solved them.
‘Penumbra: Black Plague’ Developer Diary #2
The voiceovers are an area that has received more attention in Black Plague than it did in our previous Overture game. In Overture we had one character speaking to the player through a radio, in Black Plague this has been extended to around five characters speaking to him through various media. As we are working with a small budget we have not done any animated and synced characters. This is also a design choice as we believe horror is created by being lonely and isolated in an unknown territory, so don’t expect any friendly chats over a cup of tea!
‘Penumbra: Black Plague’ Developer Diary #1
Black Plague is a sequel, however we did not just want to settle with what we had and only make minor improvements. Instead we aimed to really evolve as game creators and that has meant identifying imperfections in our previous game and remove them completely.
