One of my goals for 2019 is to improve my existing pages. Yesterday I decided to work on my old 2D noise page. We normally use Perlin/Simplex noise to make terrain heightmaps, but on that page I used Fourier transforms instead. Perlin/Simplex noise are a fast approximation of the things you can get from Fourier transforms.

The 3D renderer on that page always bothered me. It was one of my early experiments with WebGL. I had never been able to figure out exactly what I didn't like or how to fix it.

I decided to improve the renderer.

I read through the code to and realized it was written so long ago that let and const weren't even widely available! I started by updating the code style to match the code I write today. I read through the rendering code and decided to switch from raw WebGL to regl.js, which lets me experiment and iterate much more quickly.

I wanted to compare the old and new output easily, so I put them side by side on the page. I wanted to try two techniques with the new renderer:

1. Instead of building a new 3D quad mesh on the CPU every time the data changed, I built a single 2D triangle mesh with x,y, and then read the heightmap data from a texture on the GPU. Reading textures from vertex shaders is widely supported now. This way, I only have to update the texture on each render instead of rebuilding the mesh. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out why it wasn't interpolating pixels values; I had to put in my own interpolation.
2. Instead of calculating normals and lighting on the CPU every frame, I calculated them in the fragment shader on the GPU. But I didn't want to use a standard lighting system; I wanted to apply outlines instead. I had learned how to do this in mapgen4 and wanted to try an even simpler approach here. This worked out really well.

In this comparison you can see how the dark/light spots in the noise are renderered in the two renderers. With the old renderer (green) the color changes but the shapes are all mushy. With the new renderer (gray) the dark/light matches the noise, and the mountain peaks are easier to see.

In smooth areas you can see how the outlines help show the shapes. You can also see that the old renderer flipped the elevation upside down (oops!).

With blue noise (positive exponents) the new renderer looks much better:

I'm really really happy with outlines! Compare:

The outlines are one line of code:

void main() {   float light = 0.1 + z - fwidth(z) * u_outline;   gl_FragColor = vec4(light, light, light, 1); } 

I darken the color based on fwidth(z). The GL extension OES_standard_derivatives calculates how much an expression changes from the current pixel(fragment) to adjacent pixels. When z changes a lot, that usually means it's changing from one mountain peak to another, so I darken the output color.

There are still more things I'd like to improve on this page, but the renderer was the thing that bothered me the most, and I'm now happy with it. The other changes will wait until another day.

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   Just in time to hit the battlefield a week or two after the end of our Firestorm Campaign... but they are here.

   I just got some air defense systems and some heavy artillery support. The ADA comes in the form of a pair of ZSU-23-4 "Shilkas" and SA-13 "Gopher" missile tracks. The Artillery is a trio (battery) of 2S3 Acacias.

Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design

Due to the lack of registrations, the 2017 Global Game Jam @ KSU will not be held at KSU this year :'-(.

You are still encouraged to jam over the GGJ weekend, there are several sites available in Atlanta.

These are the games we spent the most time playing this year (not necessarily games that were published in 2017).

Last year the list was strictly in order of how many hours we spent playing each game. We did more or less the same this time, but we disqualified any games that we didn't play at least five times over the course of the year.

Honorable Mention

Most anticipated games for 2018

Home at last! (Stopped to enjoy some family time and not to mention watching GofT finale in good company. (I liked it btw, pretty close to what I had been expecting for a while but that's not relevant here. )

Back to Huzzah!.

Friday night's game was the first ambush scenario from CS Grant's Scenarios for Wargames. This is another old favourite that I have played scores of times and in almost every scale and period. Easy to draw, hard for either side to win. This time the rules were With MacDuff to the Frontier.

Pictures are a bit scarce on this one and pretty low quality due to low lighting and inadequate skill on the part of the cameraman.

The King Michael Pandours begin their long struggle to push back and eliminate the enemy skirmishers.

A die roll allowed the attackers to spot one the defenders' hidden units so the shooting started early.

The escort had trouble deploying in the narrow gap and started to spread out, pushing the ambushers back. The Defenders responded by bringing up their main force.

The Pandours were eventually cut up by the enemy light troops, their place being taken by the Blues. The escort cavalry being already badly battered, a new infantry assault was organized to carry the bridge.

The Light Infantry who had been driven out of their initial ambush position had eventually moved by the flank towards the road exit and became the defacto escort for the enemy wagons.