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Good morning and my best wishes to those in the Washington DC area - hope the weather gets better there soon. Anyhow, here are the news for today: RPGVault has published the 13th Horizons Developer Diary, in which Tony Bertapelli talks about the game's client graphic technology:
The 3D graphics effects in Horizons are built around a shader language and a DirectX graphics engine that are scalable, extendable and flexible. Effects as simple as a single texture mapped building or as complex as a reflective, refractive and partially transparent simulated water surface are achievable through the Horizon Shader Language. Buildings with ornate stained-glass windows, a ghostly character that changes opacity as they move through an environment, and a chameleon-like character with clothing that adapts to the environment are easily described in the shader language. The Horizon Shader Language is based on a large set of simple, dynamically modified rendering commands, contained in hierarchically structured text definition files. The main goal in the design of the shader language is to have non-programmers easily define efficient and complex shader effects that run on a wide range of 3D graphics cards. The design philosophy behind the Horizon graphics engine is that rendering effects are composed of many simple commands instead of a few complex all-in-one commands. The Horizons graphics engine is designed to last for years through continued extensions to the Horizon Shader Language. |
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Horizons Dev Diary #13 at RPGVault
