Black and white 1 style overlapping influence border

For the record Lethn, I’ll buy this game retail if you’re able to release it. Just please make the cinematic diaglog skippable and allow entry to level 3 without crashing

 

LOL thanks, that's nice of you, I'll probably be putting it on Itch.io first and maybe GameJolt as their sites that seem to be more okay with the pricing I have planned. I've actually already started releasing live builds pre-alpha and I'm working on version 0.1 now, pre-alpha and alpha will be completely free as I really want to get people playing and providing feedback. I'm going with mount and blade's business practice, so I'll charge a tiny amount for beta and early adopters will be able to get the game dirt cheap then it will be full price once I consider it 'almost finished'.

Also yes, I remember how utterly buggy Black and White 1 was, it's one of the reasons that I got into this crazy project in the first place, I got fed up of all of the bugs in one of my favourite games and EA don't even seem to care enough about this series anyway to ruin it like they've ruined everything else they've brought back from the dead.

I still remember a fairly infamous bug with the creature behaviour in one of the earlier versions that I think is still there where if your creature eats fish it thinks that counts as 'meat' so it then decides it's okay to go and eat villagers if you encourage it afterwards. I think you have to struggle these days to make a game that riddled with bugs so it should be a fairly solid game.

I should post it up in the WIP section at some point now I think about it.

 

EA has a bad track record with strategy games. Like really bad. And it’s devs are never able to fully replicate or improve on classic game mechanics that made the original games addictive.

you could get away with not calling it black and white instead good and evil, make a skirmish mode, get it on steam early access. Nothing wrong with that legally since it is a heavily neglected genre

 

The main issue is money and marketing. You can see it with Blizzard, EA, Activision, Rockstar, and many more
A lot of companies make a good project, then they fear that moving on and making a new one will crash their business - rendering the company bankrupt and all of it's games - gone

Thats one of the biggest problems with gaming studios. As soon as you launch a game there is 50% chance you will bankrupt. if you do not have the budget to sustain the maintenance of the games you have AND paying your employees - the studio is doomed. my first internship was in a gaming studio and a lot of decisions were driven by management. The game i worked on stopped development 2 years after i left, just because it wasn't bringing enough revenue. There is a whole community that wants it back, but the devs have moved to other things in their lives :shrug:

 

So I think I'm close but maybe missing something... shader looks good. But the inside of the ring is transparent and not sure why.

 

The inside is not transparent but simply not rendered. Almost all shaders only render the front side of a mesh. One reason is that in order to calculate correct lighting the shader needs the vertex normals pointing outwards. However for the backfaces the normals would be wrong. That's why the few shaders which do actually render both sides are usually unlit shaders because in that case the normals don't matter.

The usual way to render both sides properly is to simply create the inner and outer faces. So you would simply duplicate all vertices, flip the normals around and create the opposite faces out of those vertices.

It is possible to create a 2 pass shader that can render both sides. Though this usually doesn't help with performance. It's cheaper to have a larger mesh with a single pass shader than a smaller mesh with a shader with multiple passes. Also when you want to apply textures to your mesh you can only control the UVs for both sides at the same time. One side would always be flipped / mirrored.

There are two other ways to make both sides visible, though those require quite high specs and are not that great for the performance either. One is to use a geometry shader and generate the backface through the geometry shader. Since you already create the mesh procedurally, it's way cheaper to just manually generate a front and back face. The other option is to write a shader that renders both sides (culling off) and use the partial screen space derivatives in the shader to determine which side is currently rendered in order to fix the normal for the backside. Though as I said, this requires relatively new hardware support.

 

What's confusing for me is that it's copied exactly the same way as @ADNCG did but I am getting a different result . lol

 

@jmattarock_unity
In the graph, open the graph inspector, make sure you're on the "Graph Settings" tab and check the "Two Sided" checkbox

 

Bahahah Man do I feel dumb that was it Thanks @ADNGC