New renderer

We have been cooking on a new estate building renderer that eventually will replace the existing one and i wanted to take some time to write about the system and what it will enable us to do in the future.

Perspective

Current pipeline

One major flaw of our current buildings renderer is that it has a hard time to cope with perspective. If you have ever played the game, you would have noticed that buildings are rendered in a different perspective than, for example, trees and bushes. The way we render buildings today is that we describe the shape of a building at different levels along with some additional data for decorations and roof slope etc. We then texture the created surfaces using something called a skin. These skins are generally small and repeats to fit the entire surface.

Buildings are then rendered to look 3d-ish using some optical tricks, but they are in fact just a flat 2d surface.

New pipeline

The new pipeline takes a similar approach but turns it up to 10. The buildings in the picture above is from our buildings editor and looks 3d but is in fact still 2d. The largest difference is how we can describe shapes, how it respects lighting and how it uses textures to be able to have more detailed surfaces. Another new feature is the ability to utilize normal maps to add even more detail and lighting effects.

Currently most buildings have some sort of decoration that gets added at higher building levels. Some of these decorations are, to be honest, pretty bad. With this new update we have the ability to create much better building decorations and features than before.

All of this is also able to render in any perspective and at any angle without having to rebake or rebuild anything.

Face shading

To give some examples of added capabilities, picture above is the ability to change the face shading. This enables us to change the global tint for a building. One application of this would be to change the shade based on time of day.

Wall foot shade

We can also shade close to edges of faces such as the foot of a building or close to a roof shape.

Dynamic cast shadows

Ofcourse we can also change the length and color of the shadow cast by buildings and other shapes.

The keen eyed observer will also notice the silhouette border around the building, another feature of the new renderer.

New update, when?

All of this will make your estate feel more grounded in reality, more thematic and hopefully more qualitative.

So when can you expect this update? We are still early in the building of this pipeline, so its hard to tell exactly how long it will take to update all of the 45+ buildings that we have in the game currently. We aim to have some of this in place early-mid November. We are also considering to roll this out incrementally, a few buildings at a time. But this is still undecided.

End

I hope you found this interesting and we look forward to push this to the live server soon.

If you want to try out the game today and see the current building renderer, you can do so for free at Imperia Borealis