Vercidium

Rift Riff on Steam Jump a rift, fight off monsters, plunder their world. A strategic mix of juicy tower loadouts, varied monster behaviors, and forgiving mechanics.

store.steampowered.com/app/2800900/...

I was lucky enough to help playtest Rift Riff and I loved it.

It releases tomorrow, I’m keen for my third playthrough!

My life changed when I discovered block select and multiple cursors

Thank you for sharing!

Thank you!

This looks incredible! I love skyboxes like this

The same isometric world as before but everything is grass and all the blocks are the same size

Isometric view of the world appearing from the void below, but the opacity of each block appears to be random

Isometric view of the world, but only grass is visible

Isometric view of the world, but the wooden buildings are 'cutting' holes into the dirt/grass behind them

All of this was rendering incredibly slowly, so I switched to an instanced rendering system.

This was also initially buggy, producing some strange images:

Isometric view of a blocky world with a dirt path, grass, a wooden building and shiny sunlight

Shadows were finally working, and I also fixed specular lighting

Isometric view of the same blocky world with shadows incorrectly darkening each block in a strange pattern

Birds eye view of the same blocky world with shadows incorrectly darkening each block in a strange pattern, and a huge hole in the middle

Isometric view of the same blocky world with shadows nearly applied correctly

Isometric view of the same blocky world with shadows applied in inverse (shadows are brighter)

I then enabled shadows. Initially my engine only supported Cascaded shadows, which is overkill for this.

I added a new 'Spotlight' shadow system, which only renders the scene to one depth texture.

I messed up some OpenGL calls which led to these strange glitches:

The isometric world falling away into the void below, one block at a time

I then animated it appearing from the void below.

All these blocks were being rendered one at a time, which was very slow!

I changed to an instanced rendering system, which brought it up from 48 up to 560 FPS.

An isometric world with blocky dirt, grass and a basic wood building

Started very basic with a smaller world

Here's a sneak peek of the animations for my next YouTube video on Raytraced Audio.

I'm using these wooden buildings to highlight issues with classic 'room-based' audio environments.

Check out the thread for the making-of:

A panoramic shot of a forest, with a wood cabin on the left and a player venturing into the woods on the right. Light is emitting from the cabin and the player

My engine now supports multiple point-shadows

Now you can grab a torch and explore the darkness

#gamedev

Destroying the lootboxes looks so satisfying! Added to my wishlist

A wide shot of a cabin in the woods after sunset, with a dark turquoise sky behind it. The cabin has a nice orange glow coming from inside it

An isometric shot of a cabin in the woods after sunset, with a dark turquoise sky behind it. The cabin has a nice orange glow coming from inside it

A long shot of a cabin in the woods after sunset, with a dark turquoise sky behind it. The cabin has a nice orange glow coming from inside it

Really starting to think I should turn this into a game 😅

Ready for the new Valheim?

#gamedev

A field of green clovers

Smaller clovers are darker to create the illusion of depth

Each clover is constructed of 20 vertices and sways in the wind.

Fallen trees poking out of the water, with large clovers underwater

Fallen trees poking out of the water, with large clovers underwater

Close up of underwater clovers

It's not realistic but they also look great underwater.

I'll definitely need to add some underwater vegetation next

A patch of grass in a forest with no clovers. Looks a bit empty

A patch of grass in a forest with small 4-leaf clovers

Before and after adding small clovers. Small details like this make the world feel more full and interesting

#gamedev

Wishlisted and signed up for the playtest. Keen to try it out and share my feedback!

New sunset colours and shadows.

Before the world was going completely dark at the same time the sun set, when in reality that doesn't happen until after sunset.

#gamedev

Hot off the press! Watching now

Before - incorrect shadows applied to a grassy forest at sunset

After - correct shadows applied to a grassy forest at sunset

Here's another before and after - I love these streaks of light

Before - incorrect shadows applied to a grassy landscape at sunset

After - correct shadows applied to a grassy landscape at sunset

I fixed grass shadows recently and the difference is night and day. Lighting makes such a difference

#gamedev

Here's another mind bending animation about how 3D rendering works (it's all an illusion)

I talk about it more in this free article: www.patreon.com/posts/118330...

#gamedev

Image of the NVIDIA performance overlay, showing 373 FPS, 232 99% FPS, 7.8ms render latency, 13% CPU and 91% GOU utilisation

Performance is decent, the whole bloom process takes 0.4ms on a 3440x1440px screen with my RTX 3070.

Using a forward renderer (no more deferred rendering!) and the improved shadows from my last post, I’m at around 370 FPS on average

An isometric image of a yellow forklift with no bloom applied. On the left are the 8 bloom textures, each of which are half the resolution of the last

An isometric image of a yellow forklift with 10% bloom applied. On the left are the 8 bloom textures, each of which are half the resolution of the last

An isometric image of a yellow forklift with 100% bloom applied (my eyes!!). On the left are the 8 bloom textures, each of which are half the resolution of the last

I love the soft glow effect it has on these metal textures:

An isometric image of a game level with no bloom applied. On the left are the 8 bloom textures, each of which are half the resolution of the last

An isometric image of a game level with 10% bloom applied. On the left are the 8 bloom textures, each of which are half the resolution of the last

An isometric image of a game level with 100% bloom applied (ow my eyes). On the left are the 8 bloom textures, each of which are half the resolution of the last

Previously I used separate gColour and gBloom buffers and only wrote to gBloom if I wanted bloom applied to that part of the screen.

I changed it to use one HDR gColour buffer like in this article: learnopengl.com/Guest-Articl...

Check out these bloom effects

It uses a HDR colour buffer, which can store colours greater than 255. If a colour is 300 or brighter, it is extracted into a separate buffer, then downsampled 8 times and upsampled 8 times

When applied to the scene at 10% strength, metal surfaces are nice and shiny:

From the GraphicsProgramming community on Reddit: WIP Sparse Virtual Shadowmapping (with tech writeup!) Explore this post and more from the GraphicsProgramming community

Thank you for the explanation! For a voxel map it would work great, as the shadows only need to update when the map changes.

Player + particles change every frame so I would update their shadows every frame.

Found this great writeup too: www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsPr...