Still...once this is finished it will add a ton of replay value to the game...players will be able to fight for control of their own city against other players online. I can't wait to get all this into the hands of some testers.
Here is a video of the editor in action...it mostly showcases the realtime shadows on EVERY object in the city. The player has control of the time of day (via slider bar) when they are in the editor....so they can see how their city will look at every time of day.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD GangWar_Editor_Video_1.avi (10MB)
I think it looks awesome, I love watching the shadows move across the city. Also notice the subtle color and atmospheric changes at each time of day....I spent a lot of time tweaking these shadows and they're finally starting to look as I'd imagined them.
Here are some screenshots of the editor, after two days of work.
A blank map....I'm just about done designing the interface...
A screenshot lower to the ground...remember this editor is totally in-game and uses the same GUI that the in-game windows use.
Another screenshot pretty low to the ground, you can see the lines representing the currently selected piece of city, as well as the current mouse world position represented by the yellow lines.
A screenshot of a city after I butchered it up :-)
As usual I'd appreciate any feedback, especially on the video.
I had to do a lot of tweaking between the local and global shadow maps to make them blend more seamlessly and I'm pretty happy with the results. There is a weeee bit of z-fighting at extreme sun angles...I'm using a dynamic z-bias right now...I'm probably going to add some more code to that area as the game gets closer to release to make it perfect. There is still a little bit of a problem with the z-bias right now, when the camera is high in the air.
Let me know what you guys think.
- Dan
