Been working on some new shaders for staxel and played around with bloom a bit.

It will not look like this in game, but some of these screenshots are just too much fun not to show 🙂

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We have been busy adding support for .bvh animation files in the engine and we can now make animations in blender and use them ingame.

The lighting system is still in flux but this month a few new features has been added to it like calculating the light separately per side of a tile which gives awesome effects in places where reflected light is prominent 🙂

The last two weeks were focused on adding (part of) the world lighting to Staxel. It does this by doing two phases of raycasting, first it throws 24 length rays, if they hit something before being 16 long it doesn’t contribute light and if its longer than 24 it contributes full light to the source. The second phase casts 8 long rays which also takes into account the coloring of the blocks the light bounces against. It will need many more tweaks in the future but for now i think it looks fine 🙂

Development of Starbound has sped up significantly recently because of the team moving to London, for me and my family this was not an option.

After two wild years of spending our savings, having our second baby and working all hours every day to get the game on Steam it is time for me to switch gears and spend more time with the family.

Thankfully Starbound is in good hands with the team at the Chuckle offices including new members such as Metadept who has already improved many components I originally worked on.

Starbound has been a wild ride, thank you all for coming along 🙂

–  So long, and thanks for all the fish(axe)