I'm very proud of what we accomplished, and there's still a possibility that there will extra media on this webpage sometime, either on the Villager's Tale page, or the Kingdoms Creator page. Now that there isn't the need to make sure a video shows a fun game to play, Josh or I might create and post some smaller videos.

I'm now working on the Offset Engine/Editor.

Yesterday I started writing a bit more documentation for Kingdom's Creator. This documentation is just for a small part of the program, the drop-down menus at the top of the World Editor. Given the in progress nature of the program, and the fact that probably no one would read the manual even if it was included with a released program and not sitting orphaned on this webpage, I decided to keep it minimal. It did give me insight into how much work would be required to write a good documentation of the entire program, and how I might want to structure it.

The game engine itself was originally designed for a first person shooter. It was a working, but pretty standard FPS engine. Villager's Tale however isn't a FPS, and I've been slowly working on the game itself, but now I plan to move focus from rendering to gameplay. (Although I still think I should write a water shader... every other game engine has a water shader, so I feel left out. )

Also I've added in a few more shaders, such as a frame buffer distortion shader that can be used for looking through glass or a heat haze effect.

As usual it's a bit of a process from when effects and options are added to when they're fully optimized or used well in levels. Hopefully the next set of Villager's Tale screenshots will look even better.

But so far I actually like writing plugins for my own program. The coolest thing is that since the code I'm working on is in a separate .dll, to test it after any changes all I have to do is hit F7 to compile, alt-tab to switch to the running 3DKC, then F10 to reload any modified plugins. This is especially useful if I'm testing in a level with many megabytes of textures loaded, so I can test code changes in a couple seconds instead of sitting through over half a minute of loading.

Although my simple demo looks fine, as usual there are a few considerations. Any steep sides ( mostly when viewed close up ) look a bit weird with noticeable texture stretching. Also it's not for particularly deep geometry. I still need to make sure there aren't any issues interacting with all the available lighting & rendering options. Even though the normal maps for the wall textures are already generated from heightmaps, if you want the displacement to look as good as possible, you need to tweak the heightmap.

Finally, while I'm amazed at how fast pixel shaders are on my 7800GT, this is still a whole lot of calculation, and it's significantly slower than plain bump mapping. For one light (with specular and per-pixel calculation of the light, view, and half-angle vectors ) in a square room at 1280x960, it's already only 220 FPS. This doesn't sound horrible, but considering multiple lights, more complicated levels, and all the other shaders and effects that slow things down I'm not entirely comfortable with it.

I think the batch of screenshots is the best yet, the main reason is I decided it would probably be better to design around newer hardware. So these are taken on a GeForce 7800GT with some features that would be impractical on the Geforce 5900 target used in the August batch. The engine should still scale back fine to older hardware, but obviously with a loss of quality.

I added some new digital photographs to my online gallery. Desert Landscape and Miscelaneous specifically.

Also I wrote some blog-like software in PHP and have started experimenting with a weekly updating programming tutorial/article section. I'm waiting until there's more content before really launching it. For now I'll just see how trying to update it weekly goes.