Cobalt Dev Video no 1
October 23rd, 2010, Cobalt, IGFIn this first of hopefully many dev videos for Cobalt we demonstrate some of the features for the map editor.
Also you get a unique (ones in a lifetime) opportunity to hear my soothing voice (/Kinten).
Check it!
Edit:Should have looked at it before uploading. I promise, it’s not as dark ingame 
October 26th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
i want to beta test!!!
October 26th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
those time/weather settings are maybe the nicest I’ve seen in any game ever
October 27th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Thanks!
Hopefully we’ll get to testing soon, but it will be more like alpha then beta
/Kinten
October 28th, 2010 at 11:21 am
Damn, this is looking amazing, I’m loving all the ambience.
November 2nd, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Uuuh, shiny ones! Very exciting!
November 4th, 2010 at 8:00 pm
great – just astonishing
November 6th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
Woah, that is one nice looking editor.
Nice work guys.
November 22nd, 2010 at 3:11 am
This is completely inspiring. It looks like the editor is very versatile. I’m interested in hearing more about the lighting and day/night from a technical perspective.
Also, in the editor I see that the left and right side tiles were added automatically when drawing some of the house tiles; is this a function of clicking and dragging or placed automatic based on having no adjacent tile?
November 22nd, 2010 at 3:23 pm
The graphical effect of the day/night cycle is a mish mash of color adjustments, shaders and lots and lots of small details. The color adjustments are applied to all layers, fading through 4 different time-dependent color sets (night, day, dusk, dawn). Each set describes things like, far horizon color, close horizon color, top sky color, middle sky color, bottom sky color, cloud color, fog color and so on. This, together with tweaking the effect of the lighting in the main game layer, and adjusting the all the lights shaders’ intensities, the glow effects and so on, then creates a nice day and night effect.
To know if it is day or night, we modeled a star system, with a central sun being the sun you can see in game, a bunch of planets and also distant stars. Depending on where on the planet a map is location, and in which direction the camera is setup to look, we calculate the location of the sun in relation to the map and thus approximate the time of day. The sun during the day, the planets and the stars during the night are then rendered using regular 3d to 2d projection.
At about 6:00 in the video, you can see in the tile selector that some tiles have blue bold names, this indicates that they are actually tilesets. Most tilesets in the construction of buildings have a central horisontal tile, and 2 edge tiles. The editor looks for tiles of the same tileset when placing, by checking if there are any other tiles that match up close enough to the placed tile’s corners. Because of this, we do not need a grid, and the tilesets can be placed in any rotation and scale, and still understand which piece is intended. To help with drawing in an free form drawn tilegrid, we have options for snapping to neighbours and aligning angles when drawing.
Thanks for the kind words!
/thewreck
May 19th, 2011 at 8:21 am
Nice work indeed!
I am a bit interested in what GUI framework you have used for the editor. Have you written it your self?
May 31st, 2011 at 4:16 pm
Its based on irrlicht, but we coded it outselves. Jeb_ is that guy you wanna ask about that =)
/thewreck