Newsletters !
Sometimes there are small updates that most people don’t even care about,
sometimes there are big ones.
Allow me to tell you that you can now subscribe to our yet-to-come big updates !
Just head to http://www.factioncommand.com, enter your mail and wait until the end of times !
I already have some plans of what I’ll be showing off =)
Hint: It’s some exclusive fancy stuff.
Take a break, have a KitKat
It’s the time of the year where all progress gets slowed down to a point where you begin to think “Holyshit did the devs die or something?”, when that happens you have to know that we didn’t really die but instead, we’re in a deep deep coma suffering endless pain over and over again until the end of our days. You probably want to know how it feels like, so here’s a little description :
Imagine millions of bull ants crawling through your nose and ears and mouth, carrying away small pieces of your body and stinging you with their painful venom. ALL.THE.TIME.
Luckily ! That’s not our case, the real reason is because I currently have to study so hard like the world was gonna end… This also brings to the fact that being a sole programmer can sometimes be bad =(
With some luck, one of my lazy members of our lazy team might someday, during my absence, post something interesting ( or something completely retarded ) :D

Writing an .fbx ( autodesk’s 3d model format ) importer from scratch.
Awfully long and boring job, including all kind of weird problems and dilemmas.
( As you can see in the picture, the bones of that placeholder model [ from 3Drt.com ] aren’t exactly where they’re supposed to be )
Adding more features to my map editor, such as map painting =]
Lots of engine changes have been made, currently what’s taking most of my time is writing a .fbx converter. Pretty important stuff…

Funny glitch that sliced the terrain in an interesting way =)
Funny glitch that sliced the terrain in an interesting way =)

Improved bloom effect

Here’s the old crappy bloom effect I had implemented long time ago…
And here’s one that uses exactly the same technique as in C&C: Twilight !

Looks much better, right?
At first it might just look like I increased blurring radius, but that’s not the same since it wouldn’t give this kind of beautiful effect.
Here’s a small guide I made on how to achieve that effect :
- You first downsample the backbuffer into two images, lets call them alpha and beta.
- Alpha is the downsampled ( ¼th size ) version of the backbuffer.
- Beta is the downsampled ( ¼th size ) version of Alpha.
- We blur Beta, and then blend it with Alpha.
- Once we did that, we blur Alpha.
- Then we apply that to the backbuffer
And we’re done !
Unfortunately I have some exams I got to take care of so the progress will once again slow down.
We also got a new member on our team who’s hopefully gonna make some sweet sweet 3d models, increasing our percentage of our amount of content by 99%.
I noticed that some one wanted to see a close up picture of the terrain and water, unfortunately sumitgood decided that it would be great to just take a random screenshot and post it.
Sadly he doesn’t have the same screenshot taking skills as I do.
Enjoy the first ingame extreme-close-up picture !

Progress of our Map editor, as you can see it’s coming on very well (any recognisable ‘shape’ is merely coincidence) 8=)
We’re really excited about the next step ahead, gameplay design :)
- Sumitgood

Technical details about internal engine modifications are always boring to read about, and I don’t want to bore the shit out of anyone which is why I only try to post when something cool has been made and can be shown.
Now that I think about it, I could make posts about some design ideas later on =)
Anyways, enjoy my simple ray traced terrain lightmapping algorithm !
