Taking a break again from picture math and from being a weather god. Never a dull moment around here.

Here’s a little part of a feature we call Sense Overlay. The gist of it is, the world will have interactable objects marked by outlines and in some cases orbs. While interactions with visible objects are placed within world space, other senses (smell, hearing) that do not have a pinpoint location are placed in an orbit around the player’s head. Because if you happen to be a humanoid, that’s where most of your sensing happens.

This concept art depicts your sense of smell being a bit… saturated by your surroundings.

Here’s a very early go at programming it, along with a bit of clipping. Devlogs are never complete without a bit of involuntary clipping.

You press Tab to call up your Sense Overlay which includes the selection ring becoming an orbit of sense orbs (affectionately named Hula and Halo by the programmers). This was a quick update, more on those bad boys later.

Also. After a motherboard crash in the studio, I got to work on my crappy little laptop for a while and decided to give up my beautiful render-to-mask highlight system. Rendering the whole scene with replaced shaders and edge-detecting the result in post-process seems to hog up a bit too much GPU time, even after several optimizations.

We are aiming the game for oldish hardware as well and thus might have to make do with the good old mesh extrusion method. Will have to review the asset creation pipeline because those sharp edges are going to be a pain.

Any ideas on efficient silhouette highlighting when your model has split vertex normals?