T w e n t y S i d e d

Last time I talked about what an atlas texture is, why we need them, and how I use them. The important thing is that I’m not hand-crafting the atlas every time I add a new texture. I have some code that does all of this for me. It reads all the images in a particular folder, sorts them-large-to-small for efficient packing, and then generates my atlas texture. It also stores the location of each texture within the atlas. So later when I’m busy generating walls and level geometry, I can say:

cell = LibraryAtlas.Lookup (“textureName”);

That gives me the location of the sub-texture within the atlas. Now I can plot uv coords as if I was using a standalone texture and not worry about the atlas at all. That’s immensely important when you’re building polygons with code and you want to keep things as simple as possible.

Last time I shared my atlas texture. Actually, that was just one fourth of the atlas. Sort of? The point is, I don’t just have one atlas texture. I have four.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Bug Hunt #5: More About the Atlas”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’m afraid this one got away from me. I wanted to talk about code reuse. So I decided to talk about the atlas texture I’m using. But then I needed to explain what that is and why we need it. And then I got dragged into asides about how I use my atlas and some theory about how texture addressing works.  

So my two-paragraph aside is now an entire entry of information that’s not directly connected to the problem of generating 3D levels. I could send this mess back for another round of editing and restructuring, but then I’d have nothing to post this week and you would be sad.

I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. – Blaise Pascal

I don’t know if this entry will hold up, but I think we can all at least agree that Blaise Pascal is one of the coolest names ever. My anglo-centric take on his first name is that it ought to be pronounced “Blaze”. Blaze Pascal! That’s practically a superhero name.

Anyway, I’m now making this overlong post even longer by complaining about the length. Let’s just Get On With It before I make everything worse.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Bug Hunt #4: Atlas”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A point of order: In the last entry I talked about deforming the walls to give them some interest. In my final example screenshot, I showed an image of hallways that bulged out in the middle. I didn’t make it totally clear how I planned to use this, and as a result some people were left with the impression that my plan was to have bare bulbous walls everywhere.

The bulbous walls were just a minimum-effort demonstration of the idea. My plan is to have the shape of the wall vary by room type. Maybe the corridors will be wide but short, like the ship in Alien. Maybe some walls will be very narrow and tall like in the first level of System Shock 2. Whatever.

There was also the concern that bare walls would get boring, and I should add greebles. I’m currently planning on using the “furniture” idea for this. Something like this image from System Shock 2:

If that doesn’t work out, then maybe I’ll back up and try something else. But let’s try this easy thing first.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Bug Hunt #3: The Doors”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.