$12256 / $11500
Hi, first of all I want to say that I really like FLARE and also the graphics, and I want to thank everyone involved very much for the hard work on this game. There's one point that's bothering me about the graphics, though: The environment looks rather flat and boring, and some kind of lighting would be pretty cool. The coolest way to add some light would be something like in the Ethanon engine, but I guess that would be rather difficult and time intensive to implement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmn6zhDJGLE&feature=relmfu
So my suggestion is to overlay everything with a tilable image, with some bright and dark areas, and set it to overlay blending mode. In outdoor areas that would make the ground look a bit hilly or like the clouds would cast some shadows. Indoors it fakes light that is coming from the torches. I've made some before and after screenshots to give you an impression. Of course the hue and saturation could be changed for different locations and situations.
http://imageshack.us/a/img62/9127/flareoverlay1before.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img96/1664/flareoverlay1.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img526/4097/flareoverlay2before.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img826/2005/flareoverlay2.jpg
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Lighting is something that has been discussed quite a bit amongst the devs. First, there's no "overlay" blending mode when we render each layer. So if you're trying to see how things might look in GIMP/Photoshop, use Normal blending mode and change the Opacity. Anyway, we tried to do something like this with another tile layer that contained semi-transparent dark tiles, but the drop-off wasn't soft enough, so it looked funny. I think our best bet for a lighting system will be if we move to SDL 2.0, which would probably let us easily use OpenGL (and thus have true dynamic lighting).
All that being said, the first two outdoor screenshots have a bit of a vignetting effect, which looks kind of neat IMHO. And I think it would be possible to do something like that on the current engine, and that it's worth experimenting with such an effect.
Alright, so tried adding a vignette effect to the engine for fun: http://imgur.com/a/sfFno
I like how it looks, but it's very CPU intensive to draw 4 quarter-screen sized surfaces along with everything else (and that's just at 640x480). Plus, I haven't added a way to scale the images up to the screen resolution when they're loaded (could probably borrow from the SDL_gfx package for that). We *could* have a video option to enable/disable it if we really want to put this in the game. However, I think something like this would be better off in an OpenGL powered engine.
The vignette effect makes the scene look a bit more interesting, but if it affects the performance too much, I would probably turn it off as well. Hopefully it won't take too long till FLARE gets a lighting system, as good lighting is pretty important to create an interesting atmosphere.
My 2 cents, im stuck away from my main comp, and just have a netbook atm, and I like flare the way it is, fast, light, and netbook friendly!
Ive been buying a lot of indie games, latley especially from the humble indie bundle, and im amazed that such simple games require ultra high resolutions and modern computers, and graphics cards. I had hoped FTL would work on my netbook but the system requirements are practically those of mw2, hehe.
I would recommend that flare stick with SDL, and do some fancy tricks like semi transparent surfaces for lights instead.
If ever OpenGL is added, I hope its an optional requirement to build
@xmorg
I agree. I use an Atom-based netbook as my primary development machine for Flare, and it's nice to be able to test on the same machine as you compile :) I should give a special thanks to Stefan, who has done a lot in terms of optimizing so that we can run Flare on lower end systems.
I think SDL 2.0 might be our best bet if we want to support both OpenGL and our current method, but we'll see when the time comes.