A small tech demo of some recent experimentation. Watch in 60fps FHD for best effect.
Now, don’t get excited. This didn’t happen overnight. This is the result of about two weeks of work.
This is all-new code, not based on CIU at all (well, except one calculation involving bounce angles). What makes it complicated is that I didn’t want it to be an instantaneous effect like in CIU. I wanted the beams to be visibly reaching out and connecting to targets (and correspondingly when it’s time for them to dissipate).
The electricity beams are calculated using a physically-accurate electric charge model coupled with a 100K particle system that simulates how electric fields interact with solid mass objects. Glows are calculated with a thermodynamic simulation of air particles being heated up by passing electrons. Rendering is done using ray-tracing (RTX 4080+ card required).
…
I’m joking, of course. It’s all fake. Smoke and mirrors. It can easily run on 20-year old hardware. Visually, it doesn’t use any graphics capabilities that OpenGL didn’t have back in 1999.
Which got me thinking… why is it my games from 1999 don’t look like that? Why don’t any games from 1999 look like that? Sure, the resolution would not be as high, and they would use 16-bit rather than 32-bit color, but the rest is perfectly doable given the technology of that time.
What changed in the meantime? Did development tools improve? Did understanding of geometry and algorithms evolve? Did relevant knowledge become widely disseminated and accessible through the internet? Or was I just limited by my own lack of skill back then?
This is very electrifying, that whole tech demo has left me static,
the way the lightning bounces and connects to the orbs is so satisfying and smooth, also that background looks BRILLIANT! (could it be added into CIU one day?)
I for one couldn’t contain my excitement when you announced this game yesterday, we’re all looking forward to seeing how it evolves over time, you got all our support.
Let me guess, seem like the process to add all Episodes (not DLCs) to all platform (iOS, Android) made iA take a very long time and they started to be tired. While that, iA start to get rest a while and they found something interested in “electric”.
But well, i like it. I think there’re very little games that their developer take their time to force to how electric/lightning work or something. And yes… in CIU, if you use Lightning Fryer in some waves that have a lot of indestructible barriers, you can understand how much is it pretty. And uh… powerful, i mean that (though Lightning Fryer sometime isn’t strong much in the highest difficult, and sometimes Lightning Fryer cause many Asassin Chicks to kill us just by one shot from ourshelves, which many people don’t like it.)
I can say, if you have a lot of time, you can make your new game. That might be something different and breathrough. That’s all. Just my guess, i don’t know exactly how do you feel about the whole progress that you did for almost one years (two years if we also count CIxU).
