Big Game Project: Week Four

Apologies for the late report! This will cover what I did during the –fourth- week of the project that is the one previous to this.

Week four was a bit of an obstacle course for me involving the implementation of a Skybox in Unity. While the act itself was simple enough the Lead Designer wished for us to utilise a 3D Skybox in the manner that is found in the Source engine and its related games where the 3D scene is projected on a larger scale thanks to some clever coding enabling greater optimisation. After several days of trying to work it out it just didn’t seem possible to replicate outside of the Source engine. Thus I was left to work with more traditional methods.

When I began construction of the box’s textures I worked with a panoramic shot of the sky in order to have a seamless appearance. Making a six-sided cubemap felt the better alternative as I just had to align six pictures of the shot accordingly (Front, Back, Left, Right, Up, Down). Once that was accomplished it was a simple matter of adding the screens into the Unity project’s asset list although there was a persistent problem of texture bleeding. This was corrected by adjusting the settings of each picture (note to self: make sure Wrap mode is always set to “Clamp”). With this out of the way further work could be made on the environment scene in earnest. Consulting with the Lead Designer we felt it necessary to implement larger scale background scenery as the current landscape was inadequate to prevent seeing the dark lower part of the textures. Future adjustments to scale will likely also be necessary in order to evade immersion breaking during gameplay. The background scenery will be of a larger scale to help bringing context to the world and keep the player immersed. Their place in the setting should be emphasised with mountain ranges and cities made visible on the horizon.

That’s all until the next update!

Björn Erik Berndtsson. Graphics and Game Design.