like.. whao.. Oculus Rift in spaaaaaaaaaacce.

So I got the Rift in the mail on Monday night.

Space in the Rift is kinda of like... " ..Hnnnngggg... "

Putting the Rift on is like bending time and space itself to do your bidding. You like explosions right? They're pretty cool? Wrong. Those explosions are for pussies. Explosions as you know them are more like 99 cent firecrackers until you put a Rift on. You literally see and feel depth with the rift in a way you can't explain, convey, or visualize on a flat monitor. The sheer awesomeness of all content that ever was or ever will be is multiplied by a factor of ten with the Rift.

Ah, you think I'm exaggerating by now.

Nope.

Nu-uh.

Nein.

Negatory, sir.

This thing melts faces. If it wasn't for this Dev Kits' twinky 1280x800 display I'm pretty sure I would have stapled my eyelids open and played science until the sun came up and negotiated my surrender.

I'm going to do everything I possibly can in Brevis to make people crap their khakis while playing. I hope you like awesome stuff, because in 2014 there will be plenty to go around.

To IndieDB we go

               

I finally got around to putting the project on IndieDB, so you can also track progress there but most of the juicy low-level devblog stuff will remain here while the bulk of the content on IndieDB will be high level 'pretty' updates for gamer types and not so much dev types.

Moar Lightmapping

Today I got very acquainted with lightmapping.

After beating my head against the wall trying to squeeze proper control out of the basic lightmapping options I started looking for tips online and found out that there is an extension. Lightmapping Extended is a very good - and free - addon for Unity that exposes (and comments/explains!) nearly all of the better controls for Beast's lightmapping. If you're familiar with rendering traditionally then you'll feel right at home in its panels.

I also found some good case studies and experiments on this blog which were helpful and would do well to supplement your customization choices and help optimize your bake times. You may find these tips useful as well as he talks about optimizing for mobile and a few other interesting concepts but first and foremost get the plugin if you're looking for more customization in your bakes. It was like night and day for me (no pun intended).

Emissive texture maps have been proving to be a very good part of the lighting setup. In many places they give a significantly more natural and appealing look than regular point lights and while I have a lot of settings to tweak to make them look as good as they could in my scenes I think you'll see the positive aspects of them immediately in this video.

I've done some small scale tests on the lower level and hangar and it's going to look totally killer when I'm done with it and have a clean bake on it but for now I'm laying it down and moving on to finalize the level design here and work on fleshing out the NPC locomotion and building some character clothing overlays for them.