...now something totally different: I recently got very interested in pixel-art games so I started playing around a bit. and who could have guessed it, the first thing I did was writing shaders:
click image for full res (..yes, I know that the bloom is way to strong, but I noticed that after uploading the screenshot ._.)
joking aside, the first thing I actually did was thinking about how I can correctly render pixel-art in Acknex and implementing it. The theory is qute simple: I set the camera's ISOMETRIC flag and use its view.top/bottom/left/right values to render a specific amount of quants horizontally and vertically. I also changed the camera's angle so that the x-axis is now horizontal and the y-axis is vertical. Furthermore I chose the simplest scale ratio: 1 quant = 1 pixel - the same scale is also applied when loading sprites. After the camera's setup I applied a simple shader which scales the image up to the window's resolution without any filtering.
Now, in the screenshot above you can see my first try on combining pixel art with somewhat 'modern' postprocessing. It features a simple multilayer bloom rendered at the low-res version of the image to maintain the 'pixel-look' (the bloom is going to be less strong in the future, the high intensity was meant for testing purposes), tonemapping which also looks good with non-hdr input, a temporal video grain effect to add some sub-pixel-structure and a slight 1px blur to make the image a little smoother.
Sadly, I can't draw pixel-art, yet, so there's nothing more than these SPHERE_MDLs for now. However, learing more about pixel-art and practising are going to be the next things I'll focus on
