9 JULY 2022:
- This week was all about graphics and animation!
- Has it ever happened to you where you play an old version of your game and think, "Hey! That feature was really cool! Why did I get rid of that?" That's basically what happened with the Shield Fighter. In an earlier version, the shield would move back as it got hit. So I took to Blender and made some adjustments, resulting in the animation you see below.
Next, I turned to Embergen and experimented with some exhaust effects. There was only one problem -- Embergen can't render a transparent background.
A little frustrated by this, I next tried Aseprite because it does have support for rendering transparent backgrounds. But graphics in Aseprite are by their nature very pixelated, which I didn't really want for my game.
Finally, I turned to trusty ol' Blender and found a great (but dated) Youtube tutorial on how to make engine exhaust. But even here, I found that rendering against a transparent background was (seemingly) not possible. Thankfully I found a compositing node tree online that fixed the issue!
The shield fighter was the first to get the new exhaust animation, followed by the player ship.
It would have been nice to have bloom, but trying to render bloom against a transparent background is ridiculously complicated. This article I found here helps explain why. Basically, if your game engine or 3D program doesn't have proper alpha channel support, the best you can hope for is a post-processing type of workaround.
- Finally, I came across some VERY shocking news this week. As you all may know by now, I am developing this game in QB64, a very updated and modern version of the QBasic programming language. The website qb64.org has been EXTREMELY valuable in the forums and official documentation for learning how to use special commands and whatnot. But I recently noticed something: The website was always down whenever I tried to visit it. Thinking it was just server maintenance or something, I thought nothing of it, but then I finally got curious enough to ask on a QB64 discord server where I learned the horrifying truth:
CRAZY HUH?
So before all this happened, people could upload snippets of code or even whole programs for others to try out. But because of the whole "ownership" issue and backlash, this one guy (who nobody really seems to know very well) just decided to nuke just about everything QB64 related.
So what does this mean for Scrapship?
Ultimately, nothing. There is a historical backup of the original site that has all the documentation, but it now seems very unlikely that QB64 will be getting any more updates. That's fine, a lot of the new features that have rolled out I haven't been using anyways. All of the core commands and functionalities I need are still there. But it does give me strong reasons to consider switching to a game engine for my next game.
Quote of the Week:
"Don't be the one thing standing in your way."
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!