Cel Shading and iNovae

Development
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I was thinking of making an iOS game as my first real project. I am nearly finished with an BS in Electrical Engineering, so my programming abilities are oriented towards low-level design. I never really got objects and classes or devoted myself to learning them. I was thinking something similar to tie-fighter, using near-newtonian physics and computer assisted controls, with an interactive cockpit. I have been playing Star Conflict, which I like the control scheme of, I just think it limits maneuvering too much. Low acceleration Newtonian combat without any hard limits could be fun. I think the Infinity Combat Prototype was good, just things ended up moving too fast for my tastes, though it allows you to dodge fire effectively.

Graphics are not my strong suit so I could keep them simple. I was wondering if I-Novae could support cel shading, similar to Zelda Wind Waker or Skyward Sword. Its just “realistic” graphics with all the shiny metal ends up looking really boring, and you require overlays in order to make any sense of things. At least in Tie-Fighter the simple shading and unique designs allowed for quick visual differentiation. I was wondering if colorful engine trails, like in Homeworld 1/2 or its mods, could be useful. Also lighting that avoids a washed out gray/brown everything would be nice. Bright identification colors and marks make sense if you aren’t going to be able to avoid detection, it would help to avoid collisions.

I was wondering how the i Novae engine would allow for more stylized designs? From the dev blogs, there should be a material systems, I was just wondering how they would work with more flat shading.

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That’s definitely possible. We don’t have cell-shading integrated by default in the engine at the moment, but it would be quite easy to add if there was some demand for it, plus the engine is flexible and works with a customizable rendering pipeline, which means you can insert “pipes” to do custom rendering ( or in the case of cell-shading, applying a post-processing shader on the scene ).

It doesn’t support iOS though. The planetary engine has some pretty high requirements ( shader model 4.1+ ) and I’m sorry to say it won’t run any time soon on any mobile system.

1 Like
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Actually NVIDIA just announced the Tegra K1 which is based on kepler and supports OpenGL 4.4 yesterday so we may be able to run on K1 powered Android devices sometime this year - if we finished porting the engine to Android :p.

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Please don’t. I bet Tegra K1 is just hype and it will be a disappointment.

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We aren’t planning on supporting mobile until after I:B ships.

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I was hoping you wouldn’t port it to mobiles at all. If you do could you not make the multiplayer cross-platform? It’d suck to play with a mobile against pcs.

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I was referring to the engine, not the game.

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That’s great then. I was starting to worry you might dumb down the game so mobiles could support it.

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Currently no mobile platform can run the game with the level of detail we’re targeting and it will likely stay that way for a few years at least.