Critique > Devlogs & Projects
Wings of Saint Nazaire (Large Images!)
Indigo:
You've made me weep with joy. I hate you, you bastard.. Very good work here. Tremendous attention to detail.
A couple of suggestions:
The jitters! I get the nearest-neighbor sharp pixel vibe, but I feel if you're going to do that, draw the images at scale. there's nothing worse than pixels jittering in size across the screen - it's distracting and breaks the illusion very fast. I feel you should either be linear filtering and scaling - or no filtering and no scaling.
You can fake some added depth with some low-poly meshes extruded towards the screen rather than simple planes. I've done this on some experimental projects and provides some really great results while maintaining the 2D feel. Although this method tends to want linear filtering as well. It might be cool to see a bit of this subtle depth in the cockpit and ships you shoot at
lastly, I feel the noise level on some of the assets is a tad bit high, but that could be preference. Might serve the project well to conserve that a bit.
Howard Day:
Indigo...Wow, thank you sir. Wonderful critique, and I hope I can adequately respond to it.
1.) Jitters - this is unfortunately a somewhat unavoidable consequence of sub-pixel movement. I am using a Full screen AA solution to try and smooth it out. I've tweaked the settings. It's very, very tricky to balance smoothing the cockpit display elements, and keeping that crisp pixel art look. Hopefully the change will better balance that.
2.) Depth - Yeah, I totally want to do something like this. The problem is that the way I'm controlling what's turned on and off is by moving it through the flat plane of the cockpit. So those throttle displays are just slightly angled meshes pushing in and out of a flat plane. The key word is flat - adding depth distortion is going to make that system significantly more difficult. I will try and add it to other assets - but I'm afraid most cockpit will have to remain flat. :(
3.) Noisy Detail - Yes! Absolutely, I agree. Much of that noise is attributed to my over-zealousness with a dirt texture overlay. I've toned that back on a bunch of the more recent renders of these assets - the addition panel lines, and tiny detail tends to get completely lost in the final sprite, leaving just overall shape and lighting. Most of that detail will only ever be visible in a very close up.
Please, try the build again - hopefully the crawl has been significantly toned down.
http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
Indigo:
About the depth issue: can't you just change the method you're toggling things on/off by just disabling/enabling the render of that asset in unity?
About the jitters:
the AA solution is probably helping a bit, but it's still a bit of a bandaid. If you absolutely must maintain the crisp filtering you've got a couple of options as far as I can see.
1) you can stop moving various objects by sub-pixels, but rather round it to the nearest integer. This would ensure that the asset is being drawn at 100% scale on a whole-pixel - no jitters. You lose a bit of smooth flowing movement with this method, but gain in pixel consistency. Often times this trade off results in a more believable experience. The only thing you could apply this to would be things that aren't being scaled in-game (it seems like you ships are being scaled) - which would probably mean just the cockpit. But the cockpit does cover the vast majority of the screen, so it'd probably still be a pretty big improvement.
2) I usually don't recommend this for pixel-type games, but in the case of this project it might be beneficial. Looks like you're scaling all of the pixels on the screen x2. If you just increased the resolution of the game window to that size, and instead drew all the *assets* x2, then the jittering effect would be far less apparent. 'pixels' across the screen wont align so neatly anymore, but you get that extra resolution you'd need for movement without having to increase the resolution of the assets themselves.
Howard Day:
Indigo: Well, yes - that's a possibility for some of them. Unfortunately, I would have to hand-script every display toggle by hand. This is somewhat prohibitive, because there are LOTS of them. :( I've done some work on the jitter issue - and I discovered that if I switched my camera render type for the cockpit layer to orthographic, most of that issue disappeared. It's still on there a a bit with the displays - but I'm not ever going to be able to get rid of that entirely.
So, I added an updated build! This one has Ripple firing of your guns, a working capacitor, smoothly damped movement, and a bunch of other under the hood improvements!
http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
I also put together a unity Particle explosion!
http://www.hedfiles.net/unityexplo.mp4
Enjoy!
Howard Day:
Okay! Updated the build!
The gunfire now illuminate the cockpit, and the status display accurately reflects the status of the weapons, their re-charge status, and fire pattern. You can switch the fire patterns by hitting "Q". The current options are All, Ripple Fire, and Cross Linked.
http://www.hedfiles.net/WOSN_Alpha/WOSN_Alpha.html
There's a bunch of other minor improvements, as well.
Enjoy!
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version