Shader Implementation and Obstacles

In the last 2 weeks we've been attempting to implement shader's into the engine and the process has been both challenging and rewarding.

If you don't know what shader's are, they allow you to write code directly to the graphics card to achieve certain effects such as anti-aliasing, and motion blur.

We've implemented per pixel lighting, alpha blending(for team colors), and fast approximate anti-aliasing and the graphics are looking much better!

Our next implementation is for Screen Space Ambient Occlusion(SSAO). SSAO estimates the lighting of objects based on the position of objects on the screen and is used to achieve a certain degree of realism.

The challenge has been that RTS Creator has been developed on a laptop with onboard Intel graphics. Intel doesn't support OpenGL code in a lot ways and we haven't been able to get any implementation of SSAO to work properly.

Because of this though, we're able to draw the line of compatibility and produce a fall back plan. If a persons computer doesn't support a specific shader, we'll have multiple fall back shaders to ensure they can play the game.