Projections and mappings

Another week has passed just like that.

I’ve been mostly taking it easy standing in the middle of wheat field and watching birds. Can you spot me in the photo above?

I’m just kidding! Got you fooled there for a while... damn you people are gullible! That photo realistic picture above is actually a test render of our ripe wheat fields. It still needs some more randomness via varied textures, but we’ll get to that eventually. It will do for now.

Above you can see a preview of our first rudimentary run cycle. It still needs adjustments.

Mappings and projections

What I really wanted to talk about today is mappings and projections. We’ve been talking a lot internally about the really exiting prospect of the possibility of implementing the Pannini projection to Rituals of the old.

The Pannini projection is a mathematical rule for constructing perspective images with very wide fields of view. Ie. it’s a method that can be used for reducing distortion in wide angle images.

I’m sure everyone has experienced that strangeness which happens when you ramp up the FOV in games. Pannini projection is a method for handling that distortion and making the image look more normal.

It’s all theoretical at this point - as far as I know no one has implemented the Pannini projection in a commercial game before - so it’s a bit uncertain how large the performance hit would be etc and whether we can pull it off.

But basically an innovative implementation would allow us to use 120-170 degree FOV by default and it should still look good.

It’s something we wish to try at some point.

Check out this really cool Github page by Shaun LeBron for more information (and a couple of videos):

https://github.com/shaunlebron/blinky

We’re also trying to decide whether to use torus mapping or some sort of spherical mapping for our planet(s). Torus mapping is my current favorite but it doesn’t allow for polar ice caps which would make the temperature map creation and vegetation zone generation a bit more unsatisfying.

Here you can see a really good explanation and overview of what torus mapping is visualized by using the open source game engine Minetest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztAg643gJBA

So that you get a general idea of the technical problems we’re currently wrestling with.

Other progress

Still working on octrees, networking and the verification server. We’ve solved a few critical bugs and implemented some new things but the progress is slow and nothing is going to be ready until next year.

The really interesting stuff starts in Q1/Q2 of 2017 when we get around to implementing collision detection, world generation, interaction with the world and Rituals of the old starts to look like a game.

I’ve been interviewing a lot of 3D artists, musicians etc who have suddenly shown interest towards our project. Quite frankly the amount of attention has surprised me.

When I asked about that one person I was interviewing replied that the attention is because you rarely see an indie project that’s managed and organized so well. That warmed my heart - but at the same time I see a lot of room for improvement.