RedBeard's Dev Blog

I decided on a name for my game, considering a number of factors including domain-name availability. I ended up going with CubeFortress, which is descriptive and somewhat evocative of gameplay. The site is just a placeholder for now, but I don’t anticipate making frequent updates there, perhaps with the exception of a forum sub-domain. I don’t claim to be very creative with names, but I think this one is better than some of the alternatives like Voxel Fortress, Voxel Defense, Team Cube, FightCraft, Cubic Carnage, and others.

I’ve also made some progress in various areas since my last update. The game can now be won or lost by a team, and a new round will start after a short delay of scoreboard gloating; the current game mode bases score on the treasure quantity held by all players on a team. I’ve also added some small features like crouching, more sounds for events like flying rockets and jetpack use, a compass to locate your base and other things, time delays for weapon firing & reloading, incoming damage indicators, and of course I’ve added the rocket launcher and grenade as selectable weapons.

On the graphics side of things, I’ve added some particle system code and tweaked it to look nicer with the deferred lighting, added more light glows for treasure drops and other things, made some optimizations to point light rendering as mentioned previously, and did a bunch of experimentation with various BRDF models for lighting. I’ve currently settled on Oren-Nayar for a diffuse term and the standard Blinn-Phong specular term, with a bit of a hacked Fresnel blending term between them, and a somewhat hacky skybox lookup for global directional light. The surface variables in the G-Buffer now include diffuse color, diffuse/specular blend factor, roughness, and specular metal-ness (which decides the specular color contribution). The differences between lighting models can be subtle, but Oren-Nayar should aid the ability to make surfaces look “rough” under dynamic lighting.

I haven’t made many changes to network code lately, but I hope to make a couple of changes before exiting my current “milestone”. I plan to separate the host functionality so that the host-local client doesn’t share objects in memory with the actual host logic, which should make it more sane to add network code and also make a dedicated server more feasible. I also plan to implement better client player movement prediction so that slightly laggy but stable connections don’t cause position warping on remote clients.