I had a cold for awhile ( No not covid as far as I know anyway, I was negative on the test ) and hadn't been posting up my work as usual and I've had a hell of a time dealing with a bunch of stuff involved with me moving out ( Yay! ) once things calm down I should be posting way more content.
Anyway, another reason I've been so quiet on my own feed is because I was dealing with an incredibly complicated shader problem that ended up with me needing the help of two other programmers. The problem itself shouldn't have been a big deal but thanks to the ridiculousness of Unity's shaders it became a full on project between us all. I had been wanting to implement the same 'border effect' that the old school RTS' and building simulators had and holy shit am I glad it's finally done.
The problem was that I had these influence rings to represent where you can build and interact and you can see in the various screenshots and gameplay I've shown so far is the rings the rings overlap in a really nasty way. The shader problem I have been dealing with has finally put an end to it and everything blends really nicely now.
I am so glad to be rid of this problem, time to focus more on the models etc. in the game graphics wise and get rid of the grey buildings for good. For anyone curious about how we ended up dealing with it all here's a link. By the way, effects like what you see with the galaxy map on Stellaris and the and the powerplay influence map in Elite Dangerous are very similar to the maths we've looked at here.
