Cutthroat Studios now has T-shirts! I’d say, “Get them while they’re hot” but I’m afraid with shipping times, they’ll no longer be hot when they arrive at your door. Have no fear! Just throw them in the dryer and pull them out as soon as they’re done for that warm snuggly feeling.

Cutthroat Studios’ Swashbuckler Tees are available in men’s and women’s sizes in two unique flavours: black on white and white on black. The text on the shirts reads: Cutthroat Studios – Swashing yer buckles since 2007. Gyarr, mateys!

Grab your booty at the Cutthroat Studios Shore Side Shirt Shop.

To paraphrase a description I rather liked, a game engine is a system of systems (from Jeff Plumber’s master’s thesis, which has been passed around and discussed quite a bit on software development forums like gamedev.net and ogre3d.org). Now, the word system has serveral meanings, but the interpretation I use is the mathematical one where a system is essentially a “collection of things.” By that interpretation, a game engine is a collection of collections of things. A game engine is a collection of software components that collaborate to produce the experience of a game.

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Well, I figured I’d open with this topic for two reasons:

• I just finished it up and it’s still at the forefront of my mind
• I have some neat pictures of it so I can show you what I’m talking about

There are two components to a basic day/night cycle system. The position of the sun and the moon in the sky, and the colour of the light they cast (or, for the nitpickers, the colour of the light that reaches you.) The position of the sun and the moon determines the angle of the light relative to the viewer.

Some relatively simple trigonometry generates a circular path around the scene by calculating an angle from the horizontal plane using the time of day; the angle for the sun is zero at dawn and increases toward dusk where the angle is 180 degrees. So far, the sun moves across the sky and the angle of light is calculated based on the sun’s position. The lighting looks right in the middle of the day, but around dawn and dusk, it appears unnatural. This is because, in real life, we’re using to seeing a change in the colour of light whenever we observe light from the sun coming at a shallow angle. There’s some important explanation for this, involving the atmosphere and light scattering but that’s beyond the scope of this article. So, we introduce a “sunset colour.”

The sunset colour is blended with the “day sun colour” with the ratio between the two gradually increasing and decreasing as we get closer to and further from dawn and dusk. To accomplish this, I first used cosine to simulate these curves as pictured in fig. 1 where the yellow line represents how much of the sunset colour is getting blended in to the final light colour and the red line represents how much of the day sun colour is blended in to the final light colour. In fig. 1 I’ve labeled dawn and dusk, but you can deduce that the peak of the red line is noon (the midpoint between dawn and dusk.) A canny observer will soon realize that the sunset colour becomes more prominent than the day light colour exactly in the middle of the afternoon and the dawn doesn’t end until the middle of the morning. Clearly, this isn’t how the real world works, a new curve must be found.

The new curves (pictured in fig. 2) are much more satisfying. You can see the drawn out plateaus in the middle of the day, leading into the exchange of dominant colour more tightly around dawn and dusk.

The Result:

Next related task: Generating and lighting clouds and other celestial phenomenon (like stars.)

You may have noticed that new button next to games that says blog. Or you may have already clicked it rather than reading about it before having a look. Either way, it is the home of the new Cutthroat Studios Developer’s Blog.

Cutthroat Studios developers will use this space to share with you things that they find exciting about their work on Ashes and the Sanguis Engine. Look to the blog for previews, discussions, information, and rants (possibly against Microsoft but I make no promises.)