Äh, to clarify this, the editor is not made by me. It is the work of the CEGUI team.

I just wrote the plugin dll, to use CEGUI with the acknex engine.

The picture was meant to demostrate, that it is very easy to create some small guis.

The plugin is now complete, but the problem is the documentation.
I have no time for a whole documentation, so I am building a demo, to show the most important
features.

The CEGUI main page:

CEGUI Website

I am working on an acknex intern editor, but it needs some time (complete Lite-C code generation without xml files).

With the xml system it is possible to realize some kind of model view controler system.
Of course in a script language like Lite-C it is not realy possible to outsource the gui complete.

BTW:

If someone wants the actual plugin, send me a message.

That is because is the sum of the visible entities amount of all active views, shadows' depth camera inclusive.

Can you spot the new feature!?!?



You probably can't - no need to feel bad, it's not exactly prominent. Works better when it's subtle!

At least I have not yet seen the mirror effects of the ice. This project is really one of my favorite ones here. :-)

Looks nice, indeed. The reflections of the flames don't feel like reflections of light sources, though.
Some additive glow sprites for your torches could increase the illusion of light in general. And perhaps some sparks particles...

@Error014: This is one screen of your game, which is not as awesome to me as the other ones. Here are the reasons why I feel so:

1.) the reflections are a nice thing, but they break the design of your game. Your game is made of pixelated graphics, so that the visible texels are sharp and the outlines of the geometry are sharp. The reflection in return is pixelated, too, but in an unsharp and blurry way. Even the low-res sprites of the torches are made even more low-res in the reflection. I would massively increase the resolution of the render target so that the outlines of the geometry are at least sharp again and, the better, reflections of sharp texels are visible, too.

2.) This is an ice cave, isn't it? I'm sorry, but it doesn't feel so. The first reason for that is because the surrounding level background is black. If it where white or ice-blue, it would greatly enhance the frosty feeling. Plus, it is too blue. It is simply astonishing that so many games try to make something look icy just by adding a blue tint. Sure, an ice-blue color should be dominant but a reflected and unabsorbed light should illuminate the scene more and make it more white-ish. In your case, the blue color is really dark for an ice tone.

3.) The snow flakes are very soft, have you tried to use pixelated ones? One pixel snowflakes maybe?

4.) The same for the fire around the player: it certainly breaks the design when you use soft-fire flames for the fighting and then you have pixelated flames in the same scene.

5.) I don't know if you are using drop shadows, but the shadow of the floating "thing" at the lower left of the player has a drop shadow that is certainly too small

Your game is great but I think this screen reveals some design flaws, I'm sorry..

[EDIT] One solution to the reflections could be the "fake-way" by doubling geometry beneath the floor like in the good old days. Removes the necessarity to re-render the scene and you have perfect relfection in an instant.

All is a matter of taste :
- I like a lot the blue colors
- The reflections are great
- The new power attack effects looks great

We should need to see a video to really appreciate it in motion !

I agree :
-Background : some white/Blue grading color skybox would be better.
-Color should be more white snow on top of blocks, full blue is lot more for Water temples and dungeons


It's a retro game so no need to stick prefectly to retro conventions like pixellated on anything, it's a game so no rules, and your own rules

He could use even bump maps on some elements if we wanted.

Thank you all for the comments!

Glow Sprites: Yeah, I've considered that. We've recently added that glow to highlight the entrance and the transitions to other rooms (You can see it around the staircase at the top), and I've wondered whether or not to add that to bright objects, too. But I guess I'll stick with normal sprites (or maybe particles) for such a thing, but it's definitely on the list!

@HeelX:

Thank you for the detailed feedback! Much appreciated. No worries about offending me, criticism is always welcome!

Reflections:
Since I'm not the one who designs the rooms (the players are), I can't really go with the "copy-the-geometry"-way. I've thought about doing that, but here's the thing: It's possible for objects or particles or other effects to fall through the geometry. If I simply copy everything and abuse PORTALCLIP, things would look weird with them, wouldn't they? I dunno. If I don't use PORTALCLIP, then dungeons will look weird if the creator doesn't place tiles around other ice-tiles. So that's why I used a reflection shader.
It's hardly an ideal solution, though - the bigger problem I see is that for different tile heights, I *should* have different views, right? But I don't want the scene to render five times in the worst case. So that's an unsolved problem right there - I may still end up faking the reflections (which is, however, difficult - consider what to do if the player stands on the edge of a higher tile). Or removing reflections. Hmm...

The resolution, to me, isn't that big a problem - I could increase it, though personally I kind of like the look of it - it seems as if the reflection isn't "clear", which seems reasonable. If anyone else has an opinion on this, I'd be grateful to hear it



Background: Yup, there's no background right now. Sinve I've added Color Correction (more on that in a minute), I apparently cannot use view.bg anymore. There used to be a slight gradient in the background, and I still want to add that (and, later on, more different kind of backgrounds), but I haven't yet got around to turning that gradient into a skycube. The CODE is already there, though - it's just the graphic that's missing.
The blue tint might be too strong, you're right - I've quickly adjusted the parameters before the shot. That's a lame excuse, I know - it sounds more defensive than I intended. I agree with you, and it's easy to fix is what I'm trying to say - just have to adjust fog and color correction settings. I better let someone else do that (who knows that stuff) anyhow!

Snow Flakes: Nope, haven't tried pixelated ones yet - I might try that! Though I'm not too much of a fan on simply adding pixelated graphics on modern effects. Still worth a shot.


Fire: I used to use pixelated flames, but I couldn't get that to look right - given the scale of the player on the screen, it'd either look as if the player was barely burning, or just be a confusing ugly mess. That's why I went with these flames (which look very nice in motion).
My general rule is to make effects fancy, which makes them stand out a bit, and which in general I like (see also the lighting, which is also smooth instead of pixelated). So maybe I should adjust the torches' flame instead.

Shadows: Agh, yeah, they're scale is wrong. When they jump, the shadow is made smaller (that's how it was done back in the days! :D), so that's why it looks so super-small right now. The usual size is also too small, though - will investigate!



Gah, this all sounds way too defensive. It's not meant like that - I truly appreciate your feedback and comments! I just wanted to explain why some things are the way they are - not as an excuse, but rather an explanation!

Like any game, all people have their own tastes.
Some will love a game, others will hate it or say it's to their style of game , style of graphics etc ...

I sould say, take advice from serious problem design people could have and see if it is really justified yourself.

And keep your vision of the game on effects, mirrors etc ... Don't be so defensive , do like some studios, put originaly and YOUR OWN VISION OF HTE GAME GRAPHICS

Could you have time to make a lil' video of this ice level ?

The reason why scaling dropshadows were used in older games like Mario 64 was because it adds a measure of how far away the player is from the ground. Since realtime shadows were not possible back then, it was a good trick. With a realtime reflection, you don't need that trick anymore, because the reflection is a more sophisticated cue to the player to measure distance between ground and the object itself. I think this might be tested through trial and error; I suggest to fade out the drop shadow on realtime-reflective surfaces.

Faintness in reflections are especially dependent by the distance of the reflected object to the surface, otherwise it looks dull. I made a quick mockup with a 50% reflection-surface. In the left you see a perfect reflection in the right a fainted one; please take a look at the cube near the plane and how the reflection gets blurred the farther the cube is away from the surface:



To achieve a fainted reflection in realtime games, you could use a high- or mid-res RT and do the blurring in a postprocessing step. If you write the depth of the render view of the mirror image into a seperate screen-space render target, you can use this as a cue for a dynamic blur shader, so that you get the depth-fainting of objects far away from the mirror surface.