I've been spending some time refining the engine which was put together rather quicky, certain aspects like removing the needs for specialized 'shader' objects (terrainshader, entityshader) and moving to a single Shader class which handles parameter setting via a cached handle map, this removed a lot of specialized code.
I also spent a good deal of time over the weekend making the game look better, it still isn't optimal but i've managed to get texels to properly map to pixels for the 2D art, which has gotten rid of the nasty filtering that was taking place, some people say they cant tell the difference, but focus on Rebecca's face in particular. Edges are also now smoothly blended, this means however I will need to sort everything by hand since the z-buffer cant handle alpha blended objects.
Before:
After:
the new image does have some issues, mainly no sorting is done yet (note one palm tree in front of another), but that will of course be fixed.
Im still trying to think about ways that i can use the power of shaders to my advantage in generally making the graphics more interesting, nothing coming to mind yet but I'm sure somthing will eventually.
