Camera auto zoom

Now that Alien Blitz is in 3d it is a lot easier to play with camera zooming.

So I tried to find a good way to automatically zoom the camera, I want it to zoom when in small areas and unzoom in open areas. So basically the game will compute the distance to the nearest wall in 4 direction + the current direction the player is facing, then it will take an average and zoom/unzoom smoothly accordingly.

So the camera will almost always be correctly zoomed in/out.

 

Move camera with mouse

I’ve added back a feature from Snorms: right click to move mouse around and view farther

A view when not clicking (and looking west):

Same view but right clicking on the right part of the screen:

It’s just a small feature, but it can really help, I will try to implement something similar when using a gamepad, with right stick.

Of course you can’t view very far this way, except when using a rifle or another weapon with sight.

 

Reducing contrast on textures

All textures in Alien Blitz are hand-made, I made them quite some time ago, there are a few very specific textures (doors, water, lava, poison,…) and others are generic textures.

There are 33 generic textures, all separated in different images (it’s an old format, hence the unused space) in a generic color

Then an automatic process is used to apply different colors using a palette:

(the top-right object is the reference color, other objects are the different color I want)

 

A problem I have in 3d is that contrast is too strong, and when camera is moving it kinda hurts the eye, so I changed the palette file to reduce all contrasts, and regenerated the textures.

Before/after:

It’s better now, but it needs more tests of course. And I’d like to keep the wall textures a bit more sharp…