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Terrain, shaders, level of detail and spell VFX — how the game gets drawn, and what broke on the way.
16 posts · page 1 of 2
How we turn a text brief into an animated 3D unit for a browser RTS: Gemini concepts, Meshy meshes, agent-driven Blender rigging, and Mixamo clips, now open source.
Fences, ruins, barricades and camp dressing are functions that build a mesh, not downloaded models. One painted sheet gives them all a hand-painted finish.
Players reported workers disappearing at the gold mine. They were inside, mining, for four seconds a trip. Now the mine lights up while anyone is in it.
A worker walking home with gold now wears a sack of it. Fitting one load onto a dwarf, a ratman, a scaleling and an elf took a chest bone and a measured back.
Every faction's walls are procedural 3D models in three upgrade tiers, drawn to match its buildings, with gates that open for friends and a pathfinder that knows.
A waygate ships as one unpowered picture. The light turning inside its arch is drawn by code, from a single field the 2D bake and the 3D shader both read.
Every level of detail is a real mesh now. Switch points come from how many pixels a thing covers, and a zoomed-out jungle went from 113M triangles a frame to 7M.
The 3D ground samples exactly sixteen textures, which is WebGL2's guaranteed floor. Adding one more does not degrade the render. It fails the shader link.
An outline drawn in screen pixels over geometry that keeps changing under it. Two named failure modes, a doubled hull on every building, and a lab for it.
Ninety generated letters, traced to vector and shipped as drawable paths. Split the brief into topology and execution, and keep fill out of the skeleton.
March an army across a winter map and it carves packed trenches with lit rims. Four separate weather signals travel in the four channels of one texture.
An MIT-licensed three.js casting sandbox became the spell renderer, after a Z-up remap, an ink-banding pass, and a rule about which number decides a spell's size.
