End of May Update - Tilting sprites, light cast from gunfire, and more!

Hello everyone,

We made a ton of progress this month, to the point where the number of additions made to the game's lighting and sprite systems make it look totally different than it did a month ago.

The biggest change this month is the addition of tilting sprites; essentially, a combination of rendering out many angles of the unit sprite, combined with physically rotating the sprite, and using an advanced parallax shader to created interpolations between each frame, allowing each sprite to have one hemisphere of full 3D rotation, to simulate ground units moving over sloped terrain, and aircraft pitching and rolling while in flight. See the attached video for an example of many units using this system.

Do note that there is a lot of clipping involving units traversing sloped terrain; this will hopefully be resolved with the addition of multi-tile unit pathing collision, which should better smooth out transitions between different slope facings.

The other big change (which you can also see in the video as well) is the addition of muzzle flares, explosions and projectiles casting light. This of course, has a wide variety of applications. Certain explosions and flame weapons also have the potential to spread patches of fire, which can also burn down vegetation like trees and shrubs, creating forest fires.

We've also added track marks that vehicles create when moving on natural terrain types. Although, for performance reasons, they tracks aren't permanent, and will disappear after a while.

We also got a number of new assets in the game. Chiefly, civilian vehicles (with some player units beside them for size comparison). These will have some utility in terms of game mechanics (specifically, you can tow them back to a refinery or salvage center to have them converted into resources), though otherwise, make for some nice map decorations.

For some added fun, here are a few unusual bugs encountered when trying to implement the tilting system.

Effects like smoke particles erroneously having the tilting frames applied to them.

Similarly, units that don't need the interpolation feature having the system applied to them anyways, resulting in infantry units twisting into a flat object while turning.

That's all for now. Next month will mostly be focused on continuing to optimize the game (as these latest features have resulted in a number of performance issues), but we should also have some new mechanics and units to show off as well.