Hi everyone,
Lots of work has happened in the past two weeks, and I finally also have something that makes for a decent picture to show.
As I explained last time, the last two weeks were spent primarily on building models and the building model script. This came with a needed change I had been wanting to make for a while now: a new highlight shader for buildings. The previous shader simply set the main textures of the selected building to being white, and created a blue outline around it (left side of today’s image). This worked OK-ish, but the white texture didn’t look great, and the outline itself behaved a little unpredictable depending on the geometry of the model itself. In addition, this depended on me manually selecting each part of a building that needed to be highlighted, and it meant that some needed optimisation steps could not be done.
With the setup of the new building model script, I wanted to change those old ways and get rid of those problems going forward. I tested a number of different ways to highlight the buildings, but this one proved to be the best looking one I could implement in a short-ish timeframe. As such, it may change again going forward, but for now it will work to show highlights on both the old and the new buildings as I implement more of the new ones.
The new highlight will apply mostly to the materials that are used in the structural elements of the buildings, and will maintain most of their visual identity. It does change the colour toward the usual/expected blue hue and makes them brighter, which should make it fairly easy to identify what has been selected. There is also no more physical outline around the model, meaning that the highlight will show less clipping through other materials, and won’t be as unpredictable as it has previously been (right side of today’s image).
Now that this has been solved, I will move forward with the building model script, which should hopefully lead to building upgrading soon.
Until next time!