Technobabble warning. In this article I assume you’re fairly familiar with deferred rendering/shading. If not, google it. There are numerous articles and presentations about what it is how it’s done in various games. That’s a lot more technobabble though.
I added some simple modeled objects (stones). It looks like it’s not much, but it’s a basis for future more complex objects like trees, critters and monsters. Also, to add good shadows I had to rewrite rendering code.
So, there’s a setting for “graphics quality” in the launcher now. The high quality mode uses deferred rendering/shading and will get a lot of nice-looking features with time. The low quality one is ugly but hopefully faster, and it’ll get even uglier and faster as I optimize it 
There’s no “medium” quality, because my tests shows that the “high” mode with all features disabled or set to low is almost as fast as a possible “medium mode” (without deferred rendering but with good shaders etc). So you’ll be able to tune it if your PC isn’t powerful enough. And if it’s still slow, you can try “low mode”.
Change list for 0.04:
+ Added first modeled objects (stones)
+ Low/high graphics quality setting (using deferred rendering for “high”)
+ Soft object shadows (high graphics quality only)
+ Land shadows quality setting
+ Added crater spell in paid version
+ Craters are sometimes added during world generation now
+ Accelerating by holding SHIFT in addition to double-tapping keys
* Using Q/Z as left/forward (for AZERTY keyboards)
New version with music and sounds by Michael Grubb of ShuffleBitSound.
There are also some bug fixes, and game logic was rewritten to use new game object system from Arcane Worlds. It plays almost the same though.
You can now choose between installer and zip-file downloads.
New version is released.
This is mostly bug-fixing release, but I also added two new spells: water source and water sink.
Water source is available in the paid version only, but you can add water sinks in the demo.
You can now choose between zip-file and installer downloads.
Video:
I’ve just upgraded my site. It’s a complete rewrite of the “games” section and user accounts.
Each game now has separate page with more info and embedded video.
You can also download old versions now – both demo and paid ones.
Unfortunately, the new (more secure) account system uses different encryption scheme for passwords.
This means, people who are already registered have to reset their passwords to login.
I apologize for this inconvenience. You’ll get a message when you try to login, just use the “forgot password?” link. It’ll send you email with special link that allows you to change your password. You can actually just enter your old password there, it’ll work.
If there are any trouble, let me know.
I was tired after release of Arcane Worlds 0.02, so I took a couple of days off.
Sublime Text 2 caught my eye before, so I started studying and tweaking it. And after 2.5 days of tweaking, I bought it. I’m still not happy with undo/redo cursor movement and other minor issues, but otherwise it’s awesome. Also, it’s cross-platform and the license is per user, not per copy.
So, it looks like I’m going to sharpen my other tools too.
People on Indie DB prefer installer to zip-file, so I’m going to automate building demo and paid version packages and release both installer and zip-file variants next time.
My build system needs some work too.
And I’m going to move game object compiler I wrote for Arcane Worlds 0.02 to common tools and rewrite LEVEL UP! game logic with it. Probably improve the compiler too.
Also, I started rewriting the site. It’s currently messy PHP code which is hard to expand/improve. And I want to drop WordPress eventually.
So I found a nice python web framework called web2py. I’m going to replace “games” section of the site first, and gallery and blog some time later.
This means separate page for each game in addition to current list-of-games page, with more info and videos. Better security. User profile page, and later (when I replace blog too) easy commenting for registered users.
If you’d like some other improvements to the site or have some questions, feel free to comment, e-mail me or send me a message on Twitter.
Download free demo (version 0.02).
You can also preorder it now for just $5.
I’ve been asked how lighting is done in Arcane Worlds, so I decided to write this article.
It’s mostly technobabble, so I’m going to assume you have some coding/math skills to understand it.
There are no pictures. You’ve been warned.
Read More
Arcane Worlds tech demo is released.
Download it here.
New version is released, featuring generated levels and new graphics:
New demo can be downloaded too.
Tiles were exported from Sproxel development version by my Python plug-in.
I’m going to make a tech demo of Arcane Worlds now, so you can download it and test how it runs on your hardware. Non-interactive probably.
