Oooh, pretty.

YOU SWITCHED! YOU SWITCHED!

*does the happy dance*

Ooooooh, very pretty. Glad to see you're seeing the light. [smile]

Looks pretty much the same as before, only with plain brown instead of dead leaves.

OOoh its goood.

I like the way you smoothed the tree connection to the ground. Much, much, much better. The connection is still lacking a little something, but what it is, I can't figure out. But it looks 100x better now. Great job.

Also, congrats on the splat and light one pass. I always have planned to pick up vertex and pixel shaders...but I am far, far too lazy.

Now get some sleep dude.

Lookin' good man. The way the trees blend with the terrain is much better...I also like the new look of the terrain.

How will the characters be done, 2D or 3D?

I'd like to see some 3D character models in this scene...though that would bring up some issues. Realtime shadows, depth testing on multi-layered backgrounds, etc.

Looks good, keep it up!

- Dan

After seeing this on a good monitor (my real computer isnt back from Cali yet so I went to the public library to see this) wow, looks just as good as I expected it to.

Feedback:  That's fscking awesome.
Comment:   That's fscking awesome.
Question:  How come you're so fscking awesome?

Looking good! I must remark that the terrain is way too dark for those palm trees to fit in. Anyway, I like the style and I'm definitely looking forward towards seeing some more objects in the scene.

Two questions. With elevated or irregular terrain, have you thought about possible content issues you're going to run into with flat projection shadows? And are you going to stick with additive blending again this time?

we are sticking with additive blending for shadows, as for content issues, we haven't done much with shadows yet so it is still too early to say, but chances are in most cases they can be avoided design-wise im sure.

Lua++;

I took the image to photoshop and I had to bump up the Brightness 40 and turn down the contrast 10 so that I could see the dirt on the ground, it looks washed out now but atleast I can see the ground.

I had the same comments about Mornings Wrath, now I'm using a LCD monitor and it might not be set as bright as yours but I though when you started showing these brightly colored objects (ie. the trees) that this game would be alot brighter then Mornings Wrath.

It worked for Mornings Wrath in that it gave an erie feeling so If thats what you want then cool, but I still find it very dark.

Very nice picture overall.

With regard to the question of making the trees appear attached to a 3d landscape, part of the problem might be that all the trees go straight up without regard for the angle or slope of the hill underneath them. They might seem more attached if you either try to position them on flat spaces or have a couple different renders with slightly different bases depending on the hills.

I also agree that matching the brightness of the trees to the brightness of the landscape would help.

When are some characters going to appear in-scene? ;)

as for the questions on brightness, these are still engine tests. Until we have the actual game development kick-off (hopefully end of the summer) no shot can be assumed to be a reflection of the final game, though some elements will remain the same.

However, we do develop on bright new lcd monitors, so if your monitor brightness is turned lower, or if it is old, then you will need to adjust your brightness (like you would with any game).

I tried to implement a system of gamma control however, it seems to be very spottily supported though newer hardware, so we wont have this feature.

In short, I realize that scene is too dark, it's the first time I've lit the geometry.