ShaderX 5

I received my copy of ShaderX 5 yesterday and I must say they did an incredible job. As usual Wolfgang Engel has done an amazing job of editing the whole thing; quite frankly, I don't know how he does it.

My two contributions this year were 'Per-pixel lit, Light Scattering Smoke', and 'Post-processing effects in design'. I'm very happy with the end result and I hope people enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. For those who read the article I should mention there was a minor issue where two figures where mixed up; On page 290, figures 5.2.2 and 5.2.3 are reversed. Where I say the light is behind the particle the figure obviously shows it in front, and vice-versa. It's a minor issue that is hopefully easy to figure out after reading the text.

So to go along with the planetary combat stuff I talked about last time I've decided to show some screenshots from Master of Orion 2. Their combat is a lot more simplistic than what I described but the visual look and style is very similar.

This first screenshot shows a drop ship landing on a planets surface. In MOO2 this represents a founding new colony. For STO this is more what I envision the marine drop ships looking like although I do plan to have a similar animation for planet colonization as well.




This shot shows off MOO2 planetary combat. I want to come pretty close to something like this.



Not bad huh? They really took advantage of pre-rendering back then to achieve such a high quality look but I'm completely certain I can make it look better today in real-time.