This is my current project right now. I had the chance to get the source code and assets of an old game: Resurrection, the return of the Black Dragon. And I wondered “wouldn’t be fun to upgrade its rendering algorithms and that stuff to something more up to date”? And well, that’s my pet project at home. When the other more serious projects allow me, or when I simply want to do something funny, I spent some hours with it.
Here do you have a gameplay of the original game (yep, some people still play to games from 1999), and later a peek of where I’m now.
[youtube J6pdj36brMQ Original Resurrection]
And what have I done on the code? Well, when I took it it had a fixed pipeline forward shading renderer, and that was my start point. Currently it is a opengl 3.3 (formerly OpenGL 4.5 but the port to osx on a macbook from 2009 forced me to go down to 3.3) deferred renderer with omni shadowmapping and an exagerated SSAO :). Ah! and I don’t draw transparent meshes yet :)
The shadows are simple Shadowmapping with no filter yet, and the lighting it’s still a lambertian/blinn. Easy peasy, but I have to admit it’s funny to dive into the code and find ways to improve the rendering.
Here is the little video I’ve recorded this morning. Just the character moving, and I enable/disable the SSAO, otherwise no one would notice it’s there.
It’s embarassing but I admit that 1999 resurrection still looks better than mine, but give me time :)
[vimeo 227532668 Reborn (AKA Resurrection Resurrected)]