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.

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 =)

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 :

1. You first downsample the backbuffer into two images, lets call them alpha and beta.
2. Alpha is the downsampled ( ¼th size ) version of the backbuffer.
3. Beta is the downsampled ( ¼th size ) version of Alpha.
4. We blur Beta, and then blend it with Alpha.
5. Once we did that, we blur Alpha.
6. 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 !