News

Welcome to Colobot: Gold Edition development blog. Because releases are rare and there are no new information on the main page, the project might look stagnant while it is in fact in semi-active development. Therefore, we decided to start describing changes we introduce to the game.

Today I’d like to talk about one of the big features added to Colobot: dynamic shadows. Introduced in 0.1.5 as experimental feature, it was later enabled by default after further improvements. Dynamic shadows in Colobot are implemented using Shadow Mapping technique. Shadow Mapping is used in majority of modern games, it is supported by most graphics hardware, and it is rather computationally cheap to use in real-time 3D applications.

Unfortunately, Colobot’s default engine uses OpenGL 1.4 which does not use shaders, so implementing shadow mapping properly proved to be difficult. Previously, OpenGL 1.4 device needed 6 texturing units in order to calculate nicely looking shadows, but it also introduced few bugs. After one of the recent commits, most of these problems have been solved. “Quality shadows” setting has been changed and it only enables self-shadowing of objects. Shadows are now implemented in graphics device instead of generic engine. Devices will automatically determine whether they can use nice looking shadows. OpenGL 1.4 device needs 4 texturing units for better shadows, other implementations need 3.

Previously only objects could cast shadows but after today’s commit you can enable experimental feature which enables terrain shadows. It looks better but the downside is that this feature will eat considerably more FPS. Also, most Colobot worlds don’t have terrain that will cast shadows so this feature might not be needed at all. Still, it can be used for testing optimizations. You can see the differences below.

To activate this feature, you’ll have to add lines below to colobot.ini:

[Experimental]
TerrainShadows=1

Version 0.1.6 with tons of new stuff has just been released! Over 500 commits and 100000+ lines of code changed make this release the biggest one so far. Also, the quickest one – it’s been only about 3 months since we released the previous one.
The new features include Code Battles, new functions for building automated bases, updated editor syntax highlighting, a bunch of graphical improvements and a ton of bugfixes and internal refactoring which will allow us to make even more awesome releases in the future!

This release is so big that we decided to make a whole update video about it! Check it out below.

What are you still doing here? Now go and play! It’s waiting on the download page, as usual. Or you can click on “Read more” to see a detailed changelog.

Version 0.1.5 is finally there! New programs UI, more functionality for Sniffers, more simulation speed options, new functions in CBOT! Also, we’ve added autosaving in case your game crashes! (You know, it’s still an alpha…) And some new keyboard shortcuts are here too! Also we’re starting to improve graphics, so now you have Anisotropic Filtering, MipMapping and even new (still experimental) engines based on OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL 3.3. We’ve also added experimental dynamic shadows!!
What are you waiting for? Go to our download page!

Click “Read more” to see the full changelog