NimbleBit

Alright, enough of this “art” nonsense. Time for some code updates!

I was looking for a good solution to creating a GUI system and found Navi. We have been using it for our GUI elements inside the in-game editor we are developing and I wanted to show my praise for the beauty that is a web-based GUI.

Navi is a GUI library for Ogre that allows somebody to create the look and feel of a GUI element entirely in HTML + CSS + JS and whatever else Gecko (Firefox’s renderer) supports. Check out the Screenshots to see what this looks like.

Using Navi + Lua has allowed Dave to design GUI elements in Dreamweaver and me to code all the logic associated with it in Lua. This means that I only have to touch about 10% of the GUI related code which makes me a very happy programmer.

Here is another test of rimlighting, this time on our spaghetti west track. If you view it on Vimeo, I think you can see it higher resolution.

ZeroGear rimlighting test 2 from marshmonkey on Vimeo.

It works much better on this track. One thing I discovered is that applying this effect requires a lot of tweaking the amount of rimlighting for individual materials. For instance, a lot of shading might look neat on the cacti to make them pop out, but the same amount on the ground would look quite odd. A lot of time could be spent adjusting. I imagine that Nintendo spent a lot of time tweaking the specific amount of rimlighting on all the objects in Super Mario Galaxy. Here is also an image showing the difference with the rimlighting effect on and off.

Time to put another pot on, I just recently took an opportunity to become un-employed, which means I’m going to be busting my butt a lot more on ZeroGear and any other freelance work that happens to walk my way. As the first act of my new non-job, I have hacked together this blog to share our progress and keep us motivated.