VOXELGON

Development Blog

Palettized color the lazy way

Feb 18, 2016

Palettized color the lazy way Early on when I started developing the game, I decided on using vertex colors for my art style. I had already decided on using .obj files for importing models, however, which dont support vertex color, but do support UVs. In addition, I wanted to make sure these vertex colors came from a limited palette, something I called a “colormap”. This isnt a color palette in the traditional sense. The colors are all still full 32-bit when displayed on the screen, and can be shaded and added as needed, they just needed to start from a limited set. read more

Creating the Skybox

Dec 4, 2015

Creating the Skybox I’ve recently decided to start updating this blog again, so lets start with what I’ve changed most recently. In the past few days I worked on the skybox, the previous method for which was massively dropping the FPS, and I had to turn it off for any kind of testing. This old method was to create a particle system in the scene that pushed transparent particles onto a sphere around the camera, then paused itself when it generated enough to fill the backdrop. This meant the starscape was completely procedural and different each time I loaded the save, and I planned to use unique system IDs as the seeds for the particle system, so systems always looked the same when you returned to them. This particle rendering method meant there were hundreds of billboards covering the screen, each one using a resource intensive additive transparent shader. There was about a... read more

Why I Might Switch to the Unreal Engine

Oct 17, 2014

I recently aquired my github student account, wich includes, amoung other awesome products, a copy of the Unreal Engine 4. I looked at using the Unreal Engine before in the past, back when it was still Windows-only, and didn’t realize there was now a mac (and Linux!) version of the editor and compiler. read more

Hello World

Oct 6, 2014

Welcome to the Voxelgon Developement Blog! I will be posting development updates as I write Voxelgon. Currently it is rather rudimentary, and I am a poor unemployed busy high-school student (meaning I dont have much time to work on this.) read more