So as part of my plan to release v0.995 as a polished, sexy and demo-worthy version of the game, I'm going to do a bit of graphical work before launch. I'm starting with the menu system, which hasn't been updated for ages. In just two days I've reworked every element of it and I think it's a lot nicer to look at. here's a before and after:




I've still got a bit more work to do but I think it's a big improvement so far. The original menu had way too much contrast with bright white lines all over the place. Also had those fat ugly size scrollers which I've shunk down.

could you just eliminate bottom horizontal scroller? whats it for? i never touched it in my whole time of playing, and im not sure somebody else did

The buttons are MUCH easier to see. I think the before server lobby looked better, though the alternating background colors are nice.

The bottom scrollbar, not sure what to think of. It adds life to the menu, but in such an ignorable place, spitting out information vets have seen 100 times. It might be handy to have on release when the servers are flooding with nubs, but imo it doesn't need to be there.

Yeah the bottom scroller is pretty useless at the moment, but at the very least I've shrunk it's size down so it's not in the way so much. I think also no one uses it now because there's only ever one server to join anyway, so you don't bother looking for extra information. You have no choice. I hope eventually with many full servers I can include more useful information in those extra fields (which I admittedly haven't touched for years). I think of particular importance it would be nice to provide more game mode specific information such as number of control points, team vs individual conquest, cash rate, etc. These are fairly useful things to know (especially if you're about to join a ranked game) and might be nice to hide off to the side with the scroller.

I spent the last couple days writing shaders to get sexy bloom and anti-aliasing in the game. The anti-aliasing is needed now that we have 3D player models, and I added the bloom because it's just damn sexy. Obviously both of these features can be disabled in the options menu as they do use up some FPS, but they're fairly fast and should work on most computers. Here are a few pictures showing it all off:

Bloom now applies to certain things in the game, mostly lights, bright specular highlights, and glowing objects in the game like bullets. It brightens everything up and makes it glow with gorgeousness. Here is the old vs new flamethrower (try to ignore the fact that the model has no arms yet!):




As you can see it's a lot brighter and glowier, and actually looks like a glowing fire instead of a bunch of sprites in a row. Here's another comparison with UZI bullets glowing more. Notice how not only the bullets glow but so does the muzzle flash:




I think this makes the bullets look a lot nicer, more impactful and easier to see. I didn't even plan on this benefit but after I coded in the bloom it just worked on the bullets wonderfully! Explosions also look brighter and richer in colour.

Now let's do a before and after comparison of the map. I've taken 2 screenshots with and without the new bloom and anti-aliasing, it's easiest to see the differences by opening both in new tabs and toggling back and forth between the two:

OLD: http://i.imgur.com/bcY0K1W.png
NEW: http://i.imgur.com/woObQoM.png

If you toggle between the two you'll notice that all the bright areas on the map glow a bit more. Especially lights and specular highlights. The specular highlights are my favourite part because specualrity changes as you move around and so you get these nice highlights glowing as you view the map. This picture clearly shows the glowing specularity and also the new antialiasing. Check that piece of tape in the old picture and it's all ugly and jagged:



So yeah, lots of nice changes. Smoother, brighter and easier to see bullets and stuff. As you go through the maps you'll notice things glowing beautifully like never before!

rly great work!

Spanks!

Kinky

I love how the mutant is peeing fire =P

Beautiful work!

Today I'm doing retexturing. There are a few textures that are used over and over again and by just fixing the most common ones I've made a huge improvement to the appearance of the map. The biggest textures are boxes, brick wall textures, road, concrete and cement, and a few of the metal tiles too. I'm going through them all now and updating them with high resolution images and I think the results look very nice. Check out the new blue brick wall here in Asylum:



Compare this to the old picture I posted a couple days ago and you'll see that the wall texture is far higher resolution:

OLD: http://i.imgur.com/woObQoM.png
NEW: http://i.imgur.com/LkbXrSH.png

Just got done updating the textures on Subway, we have new train, gravel, platform and tile textures. Check out the before and after!

OLD: http://i.imgur.com/LZyjG8b.png
NEW: http://i.imgur.com/hVMvY9W.png