What I think is fun to show right now, is the post effects that I have been implementing lately. The main problem with the game as it was, is that it is difficult to see how far you are from an object. Therefore I implemented depth of field-blur, but in an altered form: the closer, the sharper and the further, the blurrier, so there is no focal distance to set. It works quite fine and looks like this right now:


I tried some different techniques and in the end I settled with a mix of what I read in a presentation by Ati ("Advanced depth of field" by Thorsten Scheuermann), my own thoughts and some improvements by Thomas/Thamas (who rarely posts here). I have two versions now for different graphics settings, which are the first two images in the image below. On 1024*768 my Geforce 6600 GT pulled 43fps on high settings and 135 on medium setting. I also implemented the exact Ati-algorithm, but bombs, does that look ugly! Close objects smear out way too much on a far background.

I also had a very useless day experimenting with nice effects for the credits-screen. This is by far the most stupid feature in the game and the credits-screen now also has a worse framerate than the game on medium setting (70fps in the credits), but hey, I had good fun! The great benefit of hobby projects over professional projects is that I can actually waste my time on fun things without use.



I hope to have an executable available in a couple of weeks, but in the meanwhile I am also onto crowd AI programming for one school project and image retrieval for another, so I doubt I will get the time.