I think it’s time we started filling this blog with interesting stuff like development updates, screenshots, ideas, and anything related to the projects we have under the hood. Namely TidalEngine and Project Utopia for the moment.

What better way to start than to post some screenshots? :) It’s screenshot-fever over here at TidalWare. We can’t stop taking them. Still, not much has changed on the graphics front since we implemented 3D ocean technology. But it’s always nice to tweak things and show the engine from a different perspective.

The avatar you see here is Mr. Roboto. He’s our crash test dummy for now. Since we have no real artists working on the project, it has to make do! It’s not easy for us programmers to make things look visually attractive, we are simply displaying the sheer power of our engine! Just imagine how things will look with real 3D art!

You may be wondering “what happened to night time?” – well, for a start it’s not easy to see a screenshot at night time. It’s also a cheat so we don’t reveal that the terrain doesn’t actually have dynamic lighting yet. We’ve put it off for now, since a new system is in the works by the Ogre Team. So right now, despite it being very advanced and capable of supporting an unlimited landscape, in the meantime the ground looks visually poor.

“Show us some video!”, I hear you screaming. We’re working on it! Us ourselves are desperate to pull together a video, but unfortunately there’s a few things we need to sort out first – bugs and the like. Dynamic light-mapping on the terrain is one thing, there’s also a couple of issues with the foliage and 3D ocean that you don’t see in the screenshots. Plus we really want to get our dynamic weather system spic and span. Trust me, it will be worth the wait. There’s 3D environmental sounds, the clouds move across the sky, the foliage waves in the wind, the 3D ocean has dynamic waves and caustics, all of which you don’t see in the screenshots.

There’s also a lot going on in the backend that you don’t see. The sky, the foliage, the water, the terrain, the objects, the avatar – it’s all being streamed live from one of our server applications. It’s just the sad reality that people tend to be more impressed with fancy graphics, so that’s what we tend to showcase. More details on the server architecture in a future post.

That’s it for this development post, hopefully it has cleared a few things up on the graphics front. We’ll try our best to roll out one of these posts on a regular basis, but don’t expect reems of new stuff to talk about. Some of the things we do are kept quiet for obvious reasons; and don’t forget the boring stuff nobody cares about. :)