Kousou Games

The Bloom Lighting Demo / Screensaver

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Alrighty, I've made a new demo to show off the Bloom Lighting engine... Well actually this is more of a screensaver, and thats exactly what I use it for.

I added a quality control similar to the one in GearGods early lighting engine thinking it wouldn't speed it up any since I use surfaces, but the performance boost is actually quite noticable on my computer.

So, here are the new before and after pictures, they're actually a cropped portion of the screen, and theres quite a lot of them. When making this new example I thought to myself... what would be the perfect way to show off what a bloom lighting engine is for? Here you go:

Bloomed - Not Bloomed
Tiny Space Ships in front of a giant ball of nuclear explosions, without the bloom filter they appear as black specks highly noticable agains the bright surface of the sun. With the bloom filter the bright parts of the sun envelop the ships nearly entirely, and cover some of the less bright areas making it apear even brighter.

Bloomed - Not Bloomed
Another shot with the sun, not much to say here since I said it on the last one, but notice the increased blueness and slightly more soft appearance of the planet.

Bloomed - Not Bloomed
I got this one mainly because I thought I needed one without the sun. It shows the glow of the ships engine (and that the combat can actually get pretty close in this screensaver) Before I added the texture to ships they were actually bright enough to glow too.

...Well actually I've upped the lighting a bit since I took those screenshots, and brightened the spectral textures for the ships so now they can get bright enough to glow too... and well... the planet:

Perhaps a little too bright, eh?... oh well, it's pretty.

This is designed to push the limits of GameMaker so don't be suprised if it doesn't run so well on your computer, but I get a fairly smooth 30 fps out of it. And in case you want to try counting, there are 120 ships flying around. There actually are stars, they're just kinda dark, small, and hard to see at lower resolutions.

SpaceBloom.zip 7.03 MB, Includes .exe file, and .scr file (screen saver)

.exe file:
Windowed, 640x480
Controls:
Numpad 5: Enable/Disable Bloom Filter
Numpad 4 & 6: Increase/Decrease Blur Steps/Quality
Numpad 2 & 8: Increase/Decrease Blur Amount
Numpad 1 & 2: Increase/Decrease Bloom Threshold (Makes darker things bloom more)
Numpad 3 & 9: Increase/Decrease Bloom Brightness
Escape: Close Program

.scr file:
Full Screen, adapts to display resolution
Controls:
Pretty much anything: Close Program

Also the .exe draws the bloom console, while the .scr does not. Theres really no way to change bloom filter settings in the screensaver, so you're stuck with the default ones.


© Kousou Games 2007 hifi version