As a result, tile textures had to be higher resolution solely to make the grid looks good. Because textures are a grid, they can’t perfectly represent crisp sharp shapes. To keep the grid nice and sharp, Ben took on the task of mathematically modelling the tile grid lines in the shader instead. Additionally, we figured we could use the same shader on both stationary and moving parts of the level. Along the way we also thought we could unify the shader so that we could draw multiple tile colors at a time with better performance. We thought that we could keep all the benefits of the old system while fixing these problems. We knew we could write a new shader to fix these two issues. This behavior can be adjusted, but the alternative is having extremely aliased, crawly visuals far away from the camera as the GPU as it renders unfiltered pixels. This is due to how the tile texture is shrunk by the GPU to determine how it looks from far away. You can see that, when viewed from a low angle, grid lines just three tiles away turn soft, blurry and almost invisible. There are almost 100 tile variations in the game and with the current shader, while we can reuse the normal map and a few of the metallic maps, each variation must have its own diffuse texture.ĭue to how we keep material references loaded for quick-swapping maps, it means that we have over 130MB of textures loaded in memory at all times, just from the tile variations – not cool! This hurts startup time and increases the chance of out of memory crashes. We quickly abandoned that approach and Todd produced each color variant texture by hand. We had tried using tinted versions of the same tile early on to save space, with mixed results. However, now that the Challenge Update is complete and we have a bit of breathing room, we wanted to revisit the tiles because there were still two very significant issues.įirst, the original solution used up a lot of disk space and memory. This is what shipped with the original Marble It Up and it has worked well. To get the best of both worlds, we used the Standard Shader for elevators and the custom NoiseTile shader for everything else. It worked great for everything except moving platforms, because they change their position in the world causing different noise values to be selected. This gave an ever changing pattern of noise without requiring special attention from the level creator. Instead of always repeating the same noise pattern based on the UV coordinates assigned by the level creator, we used the position of each tile in the world (adding UV + World Position and ‘pixelating’ to get hard lines between the tiles). Second, we changed how the noise texture was applied. This gave a more complex and interesting look. Alex designed a color-offset system using hue, saturation, and value to modify colors often gives more convincing results when modifying colors. The result was still based on the Standard Shader – using a diffuse, normal, and metallic texture – but with two important changes.įirst, instead of a grayscale noise texture, we used an RGB noise map that adjusted the base texture color and brightness based on its hue and value. It was time to create a shader! Ben whipped out some math and got to work on a custom solution. Goodbye, Hero marble you were the best of us.The overall effect was OK, but not great. This week, we’re announcing plans to cancel the innovative, genre-defining, groundbreaking, state-of-the-art, once-in-a-lifetime, all-in-one, first-person-only, motion-controlled, VR, non-NFT, envelope-pushing, game-of-the-year title: Marble It Up: AdVentuRe.Īpril 1st giveth… and April 1st taketh away. Late last week, we announced plans to develop the innovative, genre-defining, groundbreaking, state-of-the-art, once-in-a-lifetime, all-in-one, first-person-only, motion-controlled, VR, non-NFT, envelope-pushing, game-of-the-year title: Marble It Up: AdVentuRe! You can check out the most recent additions to the ever-growing catalogue here: Marble It Up! Steam Workshop. After hitting last week’s milestone of 500 custom levels on the Steam Workshop – we’ve seen another influx of some truly amazing maps! Puzzles, challenges, and secrets await in these awesome community-made levels.
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