Week 20 progress update
Added 2023-04-21 14:31:24 +0000 UTCSo far I have made all my game assets using shader code, similar to what is done in Shadertoy. Doing things this way (rather than using more traditional tools like Blender and Gimp) has helped me to gain more familiarity with GLSL and with various visual effects techniques.
This week I focused on improving some of the tools I use as part of my workflow. In particular, I improved Pyrtist, an open source tool I developed a long time ago. I have been using this tool to edit the shader code for my assets and to transform them to PNG files, so that I can have them loaded in my game. Some time back, I modified the tool to allow using GLSL shaders for drawing. The tool, however, wasn’t able to load textures and make them available to the GLSL code. This is one feature I added this week, together with other improvements. As Pyrtist is open source, you can see the exact contributions I made just by browsing the repo history. See this commit, for example.
I also refactored a bit how I handled assets for my demo and experimented improving the appearance of soil in the demo. I thought I would use the SDF of the terrain to paint the soil with layers. After doing all the work, however, I wasn’t satisfied. The interior of the hill looked more like wood, than soil. See attached image. So I decided to just revert back to what I had. I may return to this later, if I have time and better ideas.
