RageEffect Dev Blog

Eating KitKat.

Although I’m studying hard to succeed my exams, I do work on the game from time to time when I’m bored. So like I previously mentioned the progress isn’t exactly on hold, it’s just sloooowed doooown.

Things are going well, we also found another great team member !

Few days left before we’re back to real progress !

Not sure if people know this but there’s also an indieDB / modDB page for our RTS game.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/faction-command

I’ve just posted there 2 new screenshots, because the last update there dated back to December heh

I think I’ll put soon some screens on the homepage as well =)

Sometimes there are small updates that most people don’t even care about,
sometimes there are big ones. 

Allow me to tell you that you can now subscribe to our yet-to-come big updates !

Just head to http://www.factioncommand.com, enter your mail and wait until the end of times !

I already have some plans of what I’ll be showing off =)
Hint: It’s some exclusive fancy stuff.

It’s the time of the year where all progress gets slowed down to a point where you begin to think “Holyshit did the devs die or something?”, when that happens you have to know that we didn’t really die but instead, we’re in a deep deep coma suffering endless pain over and over again until the end of our days. You probably want to know how it feels like, so here’s a little description : 

Imagine millions of bull ants crawling through your nose and ears and mouth, carrying away small pieces of your body and stinging you with their painful venom. ALL.THE.TIME.

Luckily ! That’s not our case, the real reason is because I currently have to study so hard like the world was gonna end… This also brings to the fact that being a sole programmer can sometimes be bad =(

With some luck, one of my lazy members of our lazy team might someday, during my absence, post something interesting ( or something completely retarded ) :D

Writing an .fbx ( autodesk’s 3d model format ) importer from scratch.
Awfully long and boring job, including all kind of weird problems and dilemmas.

( As you can see in the picture, the bones of that placeholder model [ from 3Drt.com ] aren’t exactly where they’re supposed to be )

Here’s the old crappy bloom effect I had implemented long time ago…

And here’s one that uses exactly the same technique as in C&C: Twilight !

Looks much better, right?
At first it might just look like I increased blurring radius, but that’s not the same since it wouldn’t give this kind of beautiful effect.

Here’s a small guide I made on how to achieve that effect :

1. You first downsample the backbuffer into two images, lets call them alpha and beta.
2. Alpha is the downsampled ( 1/4th size ) version of the backbuffer.
3. Beta is the downsampled ( 1/4th size ) version of Alpha.
4. We blur Beta, and then blend it with Alpha.
5. Once we did that, we blur Alpha.
6. Then we apply that to the backbuffer

And we’re done !

Unfortunately I have some exams I got to take care of so the progress will once again slow down.
We also got a new member on our team who’s hopefully gonna make some sweet sweet 3d models, increasing our percentage of our amount of content by 99%.