Smooth, very smooth

Back to work.

I basically took the last two days to recharge.  Motivation and energy have been in short supply recently for some reason, so I took some time to play some games and just record some music for fun.  It's nice to be able to take a mental break when you need it, and today has been relatively productive.

A while back while playing with Shadertoy(1) I came across the smoothstep shader command, which for some reason I hadn't come across before.  Microsoft's documentation is a little opaque, but the Wikipedia article there is quite informative.

So basically, rather than doing a linear interpolation with lerp(), you can smooth interpolation with smoothstep().  The function it uses is f(x) = 3*x^2 - 2*x^3, which at first glace looks like a bunch of numbers somebody just made up, but as you can read in the article, they're the numbers you come up with if you figure out the coefficients on a generic 3rd order equation that has f(0) = 0, f(1) = 1, f'(0) = 0 and f'(1) = 0.  How cool is that?

You can also do the same thing for a 5th order equation that also has zeros at the second derivative, for a "smootherstep."

So, I inserted that into my vector and curve libraries, because that's just very useful.  :)

Then, onto some real work.

I want blue laser "bullets," but they really weren't showing up very well against my background.  What I really want is the "lightsaber" look - bright white inner "core" with a blue halo around it.  I was trying to put a really bright blue bullet into the scene hoping the bloom filter would blur it out, but that doesn't really give the white core. 

I modified the bullet model to have a white core with a transparent blue shell around it.  That's an improvement, but not quite there yet.  This uncovered some unimplemented features in the shader graph (the "mix" node wasn't working properly).  This also prompted me to fix the alpha sorting, which wasn't properly detecting when transparent shader nodes were being used and setting the correct flags.  Hopefully that's it for pipeline work for a while.

Regardless, I now have a white core... with a blue shell around it.  Which looks OK, but doesn't have the falloff I want.  Ideally I would adjust the alpha based on the dot product of the view vector and the normal at each pixel to give more falloff at the edges.  That's an easy enough shader to write, but I'll need to find a way to specify it in the shader graph.

Then I wondered what the game would look like if I set the parent of the game camera to the ship rather than the world as I'm fly down and around the "hyperspace tunnel."  I think this is going to have to be part of the game.


1:  In Firefox, I needed to go to about:config and set webgl.prever-native-gl to true, or that site would hang Firefox basically forever and I would have to kill it from the process manager.  From what I was able to determine, the translation layer that converts from WebGL to DirectX doesn't work very well on some code.