I knew I was forgetting some kind of light!

I model Voxelcraft off of all the old-school 8-bit games. 8-bit games come from the 80's, and when I think of think of 80's I think of neon bowling for some reason. How could I NOT resist a glow effect?

To produce the glow effect, I re-render the entire scene into it's own buffer, only instead of using the normal texture atlas I use a texture file containing glow information. It's a very simple render, I don't apply any sort of lighting. Then I apply a Gaussian blur to the buffer, and blend it additively into the final image. Easy as one, two, three!

Another effect I have is fog. For most of the scene, I am taking every vertex and giving it a "fog density" value based on fog data, and how close the camera is to the vertex. I couldn't do this with the water though, since all the water vertices are far away and will give them the same tint, so I'm doing fog in the pixel shader of my water effect instead.

Yeah, I'm such a liar for saying I only had channels and saving to do. But I did do the channels bit of Voxelcraft!

I did have a bit of trouble with rotation, though. Say, for example, I wanted to make a windmill at a 45 degree angle. Then I would make a separate channel for the fan of the windmill, place it on the windmill, and spin in along it's z - axis. It wouldn't work because it's not spinning on it's own z - axis, it's spinning on the world's z-axis! But solving this problem was so easy. I was using Matrix.CreateRotation methods for the rotation. I just replaced this with Matrix.CreateFromYawPitchRoll and all is well.


Also, some other pictures of Voxelcraft, since I haven't updated on that much lately... these pictures show off more of the mini-cube, which takes a pixel from the texture atlas and maps it onto a miniature "pixel" cube.

Also, addition to spotlights.