busy with foilage & stuff ,i need to work on terrain's texturing-diversity
and see what else i can do to bring it to life.

Looks awesome ✌
Good job man

@Iglarion: Kartoffel is right, it's pretty much the oldschool approach that we use, no special shaders involved. The key is to divide the background into several layers. For Rigid Force Alpha I mostly try to seperate my scenes into foreground, midground and background layers. I make sure that there's a certain space between all these layers. This way you get a nice parallax scrolling effect. And furthermore, when you activate distance fog and simply play around with color and distance, you almost automatically get nice results.

The last screen you posted almost has the right direction. I assume that the high sand dunes assets in the background are 2D images. I'd move them further away from the camera to create more depths. Then I'd create some mid-poly sand dunes for the midground and some more detailed ones for the foreground, closest to the walkable area. I think that's pretty much the approach that Frozenbyte used for Trine 2: Trine 2 Desert. You should also take a look at other recent sidescrollers like Donkey Kong Country Returns, they all do it in a pretty similar fashion.

Also throw in a bunch of effects like sanddrifts or tumbleweeds passing by for that level and you're good to go!

^ plus maby some sun heat effect off in to the distance , but the style is kickass

Yep, I second that! Oh, and maybe add some light rays to the foreground, diagonally from the top of the screen, with some sine function alpha fading.

@Turrican: Thank you, definitely now i'll play more with layers distance, and fog color/distance to get good effect. Example that you gave me is great, desert level in Trine looks perfect. I miss this addition, but i found something interesting in one level where we can see over 50% of blue sky on screen, beacuse the biggest problem i have with the background on the places where we can see the blue sky. In Trine i see some details are painted in sky layer, like bluried mountains. Maybe is point, paint some fog color and some very bluried mountains in Skycube to get better transition with lastlayer. Btw if i put image instended of skucube i do not know did there are some engine function or shader, where we can control strenght and position of fog on this sky image, i never try this, but this also might work. Or simple ignore fog on this layer and make fake fog effect in Photoshop.

About our desert level, yes i already have some tumbleweeds, heathaze, dust,... all models and concept is there, i just need put this in level, beacuse this is last part of game and has not yet come on the order for polishing. Trine desert level will give me new inspiration .

Here is one picture with forest. I thinking about bacground image and fog color

@Iglarion, pretty good. It does remind me of a diorama, but at the same time I actally like that about it. Gives it a more fantasy/unreal feeling.

@Wjbender, that is some sexy terrain if you don't mind me saying.

@Iglarion: That's the point. You need a good transition from foreground to background. You can achieve that by directly painting some translucent "fog" or clouds or whatever into your background/skybox, or by giving it a general color tint that matches your fog. You could also put a separate colored texture with an alpha gradient just above your background image or skybox to create a better transition. Then you can easily adjust its color to match your fog using the RGB values. Like this:



You can also do lots of other cool stuff with a layer setup like this; maybe you could paint clouds on your transition layer and move them using UV shifting.

And regarding the screenshot (beautiful by the way!): Have you tried to just use a fresh, slightly saturated blue fog that matches the sky? That could easily work.

Thank you for image, this transparet layer sounds like the best solution. I almost forget that we already use something like this in our menue screen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybZBta6mISo&feature=youtu.be
I will try make this tranparent layer with moving fog and clouds, i hope this will looks good All these things require a lot of time to adjust, but i'm sure it's worth it.
To be honest i not playing to much with fog, i just try on speed some blue fog before but that do not looks soo good. I must adapt back layers for blue color. Dark green fog looks good but only in dark swamp levels.

I just made my first tests of animated sprite lods in my little RTS test-bed with 500 characters, powered by Fragmotion. Hopefully writing a sprite animation shader will enable proper shadow casting (currently the whole sprite would cast shadow instead of the actual frame), and easy direction handling without skin morphing...


click to enlarge