Filed under: Game Maker
Well, after a massive delay this thing is finally released. It is far, far from finished but I don’t use game maker anymore and I knew that if I don’t make it somewhat presentable and release it now, I’ll never do it. So it comes as-is. You will have to learn how to use it by looking at the example content and reading the comments of the scripts.
Its a real shame that I won’t be able to finish this.
Tags: eyecandy, Game Maker, interface
Filed under: Game Maker
The challange was to draw a 2d fluid. The solution was very interesting. Because actually solving marching cubes or similar was too slow in Game Maker, I designed an ‘analog’ approach. This works on a surface. First we draw whatever the fluid ‘world’ may be – that is, what the fluid area will actually show. Like a liquidy red version of the screen for blood, or a gradienty blue version for water, etc. Then we do a bit of magic and overwrite the alpha of that surface with the alpha of particles representing the fluid area. Last but not least, we achieve thresholding without alpha testing which is unsvailable in game maker by multiplying the alpha values by themselves several times much like the contrast ramp phase of a bloom filter.
The technique of overwriting a surface’s alpha chanel alone is useful in many other applications, but I’ll let you think about that.
Oh yeah one more thing. The demo itself looks different from both these screenshots. And probably less pretty. Fiddle with it yourself to achieve the style you want. You’ll be wanting to play with the step script, which is sufficiently commented to navigate.
Filed under: Game Maker
This is a little distorting shockwave effect. You might remember it from my very impressive Kill Catalyst screenshots on 64digits. It’s not quite so impressive in the demo, but if tweaked a bit and used right, will be awesome.
Filed under: Game Maker
This is really neat. It’s a few things in one. First and foremost it handles linear screenspace distortions. We’ve done shockwave rings, but lines turned out to be a bit more tricky. This shows two methods of doing it. One very pretty but slow one by creating several point distortions, and one fast but less pretty one with a few quads. It also shows how to do lightning that follows a linear path, and how to go about making awesome energy beams in general.
As with must stuff coming out of my GM folder, there’s no help file or explanations. If you want to use this, you’re going to have to pull it out yourself.
Filed under: Game Maker
Ribbon trails are very pretty if used right. In fact even if used wrong they’re still pretty most of the time. I don’t know why no one has done this before. I saw scripts that drew them with circles which gets slow or ugly if you go fast, and with lines, which is limited to 1px in width. The obvious thing to do of course is to use a primitive.
So we make a list containing coords of where we’ve been for the past N steps, and then draw it. I’m not going to explain the intricacies of the drawing script but everything is very straightforward and you shouldn’t have problems figuring out how to use it.
When doing mouse decorations or trails, never have them snap to the mouse position! The mouse is a precise input device which is good most of the time but in the land of eyecandy it means jerky, ugly movements. Instead have the decoration follow slowly as I do here. It makes a world of difference.
Filed under: Game Maker
Luminaire… The start of the GM lighting era. This was developed shortly after GM6.1 was released with the new surfaces feature which I’ve been hammering mark about. It is old, outdated, and horribly inefficient because I was rushing to release it and show everyone that this can be done. Compared to it’s modern cousins like L3S, it’s not very much, but people have been continuously asking for it regardless. I don’t know why, but here it is.
I wouldn’t recommend using it in a serious game where L3S would really shine , but for smaller ones it should be just fine. The other thing you can learn from it is the way the engine is used to set the mood in a scene. I think the reason people still pick this over modern, better engines is because the demo is gorgeous. The others don’t do too well in this area. So look at the demo and learn how the eyecandy works. Notice how the lights fade in and out, notice the lights overhead, the use of glow. All these things aren’t technically complicated but add up to the ‘wow’ effect.
Look at it and learn from it, but you should really be using L3S or similar if you use a lighting engine. Make no mistake about it, this is a first generation lighting engine. In fact it’s the first lighting engine. It’s really oooooold! We’re now in 3rd gen dynamic soft shadows age!
Game info contains everything you’ll need to know to use this.
