Sunlight

An odd effect that can be very noticeable in 2D games is the distortion that happens when deforming a texture. Especially when tapering a polygon the art can become really weird. This has been a problem in our engine for years, but since strong taper isn't used often I didn't think it needed fixing. However, when I added trails last year the distortion became much more problematic and I had to look for a solution. If you're not very familiar with how videocards work this looks really weird. To a human it is very clear how the texture should be squashed when tapering a polygon, why can't my computer figure this out? The reason is that videocards only handle triangles. They don't really know what a square is so if you want a square, you need to create two triangles that happen to form a square together. Many 3D tools hide this, but that's what happening under the hood. When applying this taper to a square that consists of two triangles we can see why the weird di...

Last week I discussed our tools for making trails . One problem I encountered with trails is that they often don't look very good when attached to a character. Player movement in a platformer like Awesomenauts is not very smooth: all of a sudden you jump, or land, or turn around, and this creates a trail with lots of angles in it. For some effects this is fine, but especially for wider trails a smoother, curvier look is much better. Today I would like to discuss the smoothing algorithm I implemented to solve this. Before I continue, here's last week's overview video of our trails again, since it also contains some footage of the smoothing: Key when smoothing a trail is that the trail should always remain attached to the emitter (in this case a character). If the smoothing makes the trail detach from the emitter just a little bit, it starts to look floaty and incorrect. An artist can work around this by fading out the trail near its start, but this is not always desired. Th...

Until recently most special effects in Awesomenauts were either animated by hand or made using particles. This seemed to give enough possibilities, until we played the gorgeous Ori and the Blind Forest , which has very crisp special effects. We analysed how they achieved this and one of the conclusions was that for many things that we would make with particles, they used trails. Trails are quite an obvious concept, but for some reason it had never seemed like a big problem that they weren't an option in our tools. So about a year ago I added trails to our engine. How to implement trails seems quite obvious: it's just a series of triangle segments, what's interesting about that? However, when I started implementing trails it turned out there are quite a lot of different approaches imaginable. I went with one that's extremely flexible, but also sometimes slightly difficult to control for certain effects. Today I'd like to share how I built our trails tool and what th...