Posted December 14, 2019 by LemonToast Games
Hey guys, it's been a few days and I managed to get quite a bit of work done.
Let's break it down into three major changes.
The first of these changes is a shader change, specifically in relation to transparencies. Now since the node renderer isn't in place just yet, DopeFish renders all geometry in each game step. This includes geometry not visible by the camera, or geometry that should be occluded by wall segments and so on. This is terribly inefficient, and will be addressed shortly. However, when rendering transparent things, if done out of order, a nearby transparent object's geometry may clip through something behind it, essentially acting as an eraser and creating holes in the scene. This is ugly, and has been fixed as you can see below:
Another great new addition is the first draft of thing lighting! Yep, now enemies and items will be lit by their environment. This currently ignores any full bright thing tags, so stuff that should be "glowing" at full brightness regardless of the environment are still dim in a dark environment. This will be addressed in a future update as well.
And finally the third welcome change to DopeFish is the addition of the smooth lighting fake contrast effect used in modern source ports. That being wall brightness is increased or decreased depending on what angle they are facing. This will make it far easier to recognize level geometry at a glance by increasing the contrast between wall segments :)
That's lots of little changes, but each change brings us closer to having a fully fleshed out interactive 3D environment system in GameMaker Studio 2!