Just note that many of the Mythruna textures already use parallax mapping... just not steep parallax.  The rock texture, cobble, etc. all should have bump maps as well as normal maps.  If you toggle the render settings you should see them flatten out and get bumpy again.

All of this is worth looking at.  It's just that on blocks, it always messes up at the corners/edges

I can confirm. It's definitely subtle, too, like you said, but having had a taste of it it's hard to return to 'flat' textures, even with pbr and normal maps.

Mythruna already used parallax mapping.  Steep parallax mapping is just a flag but costs a lot and didn't provide much advantage.

Once one has already made their textures in such a way to reduce the parallax artifacts (it can't make pixels so there is always some ugly stretching for large relief) then the difference between them is minimal.

I guess in the video he's using standard parallax at the beginning and steep at the end but it's hard to tell.  The artifacts I'm talking about are the things that make the corners look like they have a satin finish or something.  I guess the steep flag does more lookups in the texture to avoid that.

Still, it's just a flag on the material.  It would already be available in the newer Mythruna engine where the materials were defined in config... except I forked the standard JME materials way back and never merged these newer features.

All of this is worth looking at.  It's just that on blocks, it always messes up at the corners/edges.

POM is parallax occlusion mapping(It's usually bundled with self shadowing when applicable). Basically, POM lets you apply a surface map that the game will render in quasi-3d, despite the surface actually being flat. There might be a more efficient alternative in hardware tesselation, but I don't know enough about it to say. Here's a vod of it implemented in jmonkeyengine.

When I added color lighting, the light propagation added color when going through colored transparent blocks... but colored transparent blocks have other issues.

Not sure what POM is.

Note: the latest version of the "balance" puzzle now has particle animations and stuff.

Neat stuff, especially the PBR, as I've had some experience with it in Minecraft and can't be happier; it really brings the world around you to life. On the note of surface mapping, is there any plan to include POM or native POM support for Mythruna in addition to that? It's my understanding that POM is already implemented in jmonkeyengine with the main issue being performance. Would be nice to see the world with that kind of depth at any rate, even if I lose some frames.

The puzzle game seems neat, certainly nothing I've seen before. I can see there being different elements like charged tiles that send out more units, one way circuits, and maybe even pathways that can only be unlocked by charging certain tiles to a certain point.  It would make for a pretty cool timesink... but then again so would Ethereal Space... or anything else that gives me an excuse to throw money at you. ;p

Also I dont emember if I asked you this before, but I've been using SEUS shaders on Minecraft and colored shadows have completely spoiled me. Are there plans for certain translucent blocks having colored shadows at all?

And for what it's worth, I also poke at a simple puzzle game from time to time.

It's very bare-bones at the moment and the graphics are basically stand-in.  There's no menu, no animation, etc... but it's playable:
http://simsilica.com/Downloads/balance-desktop-1.0.jar

Clicking a node either gives or receives from all of its neighbors.  The object is to get all nodes to 0.  When one level is complete it unceremoniously pops you into the next level... and it loops back to the beginning when done.

I designed it as a mobile game which is why the aspect is vertical.  I can't decide if it's worth pursuing or not... but every time I put in 30 minutes or an hours worth of time into it, I feel better about it.  So who knows.

So how are things going Paul?

Ok.  I fell off of my productivity spreadsheet because of travel and the kids' school starting.  I had no broken chains at all up until August.  I still have a few chains I haven't broken at all (like playing guitar every day) but game development dropped off.

The problem is that this year I have to get up at 5:30 AM to get my daughter up and walk her to the bus stop.  I'm still trying to find a good battle rhythm that gives me time for sleep and working on games.

Over the spring/summer I started working on a jMonkeyEngine showcase game with one of the other team members.  Just a simple FPS to show off some tech.  I was able to solidify a lot of my thoughts about AI, pathfinding, etc. and get familiar with the new physics-based-rendering (PBR) in jMonkeyEngine.  All of these will have Mythruna consequences.  The other developer was helping with the character art and has since become distracted... so now I'm trying to decide if I clean up what I have and publish it for the community or wait.

My next Mythruna related project is to push the libraries I want to open source a little farther along and make a third-person resource+building game to work out town dynamics and stuff.  It would let me publish the mblock block library and the mblock-based physics engine integrated with the SimEthereal networking library.

I've also been 'wasting' some time playing No Man's Sky with the latest updates. 

Random images to whet your whistle...

SpaceBugs splash screen:


SpaceBugs title menu:


Debugging path finding:


Stand-in graphics for soldiers, creepy head-crab space bugs:


Plasma pistol I made myself in Blender... did a lot of good blender learning this summer: (And learning Substance Painter)


PBR is cool... at the right angle you can even see the smudges on the door panel screen:


Testing random level generation early on... that is left as a future feature at this point:


Reminder of where we left off on the Mythruna open source library projects:



...which is what I'll be getting back to soon I hope.

So how are things going Paul?

This would be a neat weapon.