I am glad to say that with the exception of a very few small meshes that will do nothing more than make it aesthetically pleasing we are finished with the first scene. As you can see from the screenshot we have successfully captured the bleak and desolate atmosphere that we were trying to generate throughout the game. Also, you may realize that we have decided to go away from cel-shading and stick with per-pixel lighting and bump mapping
We tested, tweaked, and finally decided on the colors of everything as well as the implemented bump mapping on all objects. We also finished several smaller things that bring the scene together: implemented fog, finished the background images, finished the skybox, etc.
One of the two significant things that we have implemented is the TriMesh, which as mentioned before, allows the character to walk on the terrain and take into account the height. Basically it allows the character to walk up hills while being able to calculate if a cliff is too steep to walk off, or walk up, with very little extra work.
The other major addition is the ocean that we added. The picture does little justice to the actual water, but it still shows that it is beautifully done. It is simply a plane with a lot of magic working behind scenes. We made a cube map of the sky box, and the shader then uses those images to create a type of reflection, while adding waves and noise to make it more realistic.
With these few upgrades and the slow but steady progress we are making we have become very excited with the results and potential of this demo. Since most of the models for the rest of the scenes are already done, because we plan on sharing models between scenes, we predict the next few scenes to go rather quickly. Hopefully by the next post we will have a few more scenes done, maybe even the Atonian Cathedral.
-Andy