I’ll probably show off the work I did for the last milestone some more, but in the meantime I wanted to show a little bit of what I’m working on for the next milestone: Interface and Ship Customization. For this milestone, I’m working on the menu system, and my menu proof-of-concept will be to complete at least the “Ship Layout Menu”, which will allow the player to design their ship interior.

So far none of this is designed. The menus aren’t functional, I don’t have the Layout Menu designed (though I have an idea how I want it to work) and the procedural ship interiors, though functioning, are set for a total overhaul. I want to redo how they work to make them more functional and flexible.

But we have to start somewhere, and over the past 3 days my task was to use the Procedural Texturing system, hereby referred to internally as TextureGen, to create some menu effects. Above, we have a test shot of a targeting reticle. The reticle base is a simple greyscale outline of what I want to final product to look like. This outline is run through various filters and effects, including lighting, which results in the final product. You can see this assembly line in the second screenshot.

The beauty of doing this procedurally is that the textures can be dynamic, if you have the time and memory to devote to re-rendering every frame. You can see in the images above, there is a subtle difference in the lighting effect as the reticle rotates (check the lower-right corner if you are having trouble seeing it). Also, the scanlines stay horizontal, even when the reticle is cockeyed. Ingame, if I choose to animate menus, effects like this will make everything seem more dynamic and alive.

The other beauty of procedural textures is that you can reuse effects. Once I settle on an effect I like, I’ll use it to create a menus instantly by passing in whatever greyscale mask image is appropriate for that menu. Frontloading the work should (hopefully) allow me to create new menu assets lightning-quick in the future.

The other other beauty of procedural textures is that they can make simple things look complicated. I could have never made this in an image editor. Hopefully using this system, the menus will be of a much higher quality than I could ever have achieved without paying an artist to animate this stuff by hand.