Clouds, Texture Update, and Demo Update

We will have the demo ready some time next week, as we just have a couple small additions left to make. We will be participating in a game jam on the 21st, so we will be taking a weekend off, but we will be releasing the demo before then!

We've added clouds that move in correlation to the wind strength and direction. This makes it easier to gauge how your shot will be affected, and looks neat at the same time! The little bit of background movement they provide helps to add some depth to the environment and makes the courses feel a bit more "full". We may play with the shape and arrangement of the clouds as the games development progresses, but for now this is what they look like:

The engine has also been changed so that more than one texture can be assigned to the same texture name. If a name has more than one texture associated with it, the engine randomly picks which texture it will use for each voxel. The ratio can also be changed to make one texture more common than another. This allows us to increase the goodness of things like grass. This is achieved by making them less uniform, as ground textures are often placed together in large chunks. This resulted in areas that looked flat and untextured, but the current method subtly breaks up any uniformity. Here are two comparison screenshots:

Although the difference may seem too subtle to make much of a difference, it has a very noticeable affect on how the game feels. And it's all about the feels. It has an affect similar to the clouds, in that it adds a subtle depth to the environment.

We are just going to be making sure everything is in order, such as packaging the necessary redistributable files with the game, setting up the proper pars for the courses, and possibly working in some particle effects.