Painting the ores – Dev Blog 75
Eldritch. A word that means otherworldly, weird or strange. A word with a certain atmosphere surrounding it. Atmosphere is something I’m working on very hard with Fringe Planet, and this is why a large chunk of the work this week has been spent playing with shaders, staring at gimp, creating little 32×32 textures and fiddling with mesh code. The most visible work I’ll share today is the texture update. All voxel textures have now been updated to make them more consistent with the art style (see last weeks blog post for more details).
So let’s check some out.
Sand
Pretty standard stuff, sand is spawned naturally as part of terrain generation (before ores are spawned). Incredibly useful stuff for making windows and other glass items. Reasonably good insulation as well.
Copper
A block of copper – an incredibly useful metal. One of the things I really wanted to keep (from the original texture) is the slight greenish hue – indicating oxidization.
Gold
Bright and shiny, gold is an incredibly valuable material in Fringe Planet. Not sort after for it’s beauty, but instead it is used very heavily in component construction – especially the higher tier components and equipment associated with magic.
Iron
Iron is the only ore that can spawn outside of the ground, sometimes in giant strange looking constructions (such as the featured image of this blog post).
Silver
Silver is another ore which is sort after for it’s usefulness in magical components.
Zinc
Surprisingly common amongst the ores, zinc is used during the manufacture of many of the early game components – helping create alloys with the other ores.
So those are a sampling of the new textures that have been added this week. I’ve also been working on a few other things which aren’t quite ready to show yet. The first one is working on making the ores look more natural underground. Currently, if a voxel is copper it looks like a big cube of material, which is somewhat immersion breaking alas.
I’m addressing this by adding a mask ontop the texture, which (once I get it working) will take the materials around it (stone, sand, earth) and give the impression of nuggets of the ore being inside of a block of the surrounding type. I’m also having a very serious ponder about how transitions work between different textures in Fringe Planet. The engine knows the difference between a player (well peon) placed voxel and a naturally generated one. The ultimate idea would be to create a “seamless” transition between voxels when they are naturally placed and have this sort of transition only happen by peon placed blocks.
There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try: