Please ignore the broken puzzle Rarity in the background, what you should be focusing on is the hazy appearance of the characters.
What I have done here is attach a depth buffer to the map chunks (had to rewrite a good chunk of code to turn them into FBOs) and then rendered the characters under the depth. Here I randomized the depth buffer data, so which pixels you can see are random. I am going to rewrite the map compressor to allow depth data to be drawn directly onto the map, which will allow the artists to draw depth directly onto the objects on a line art map and make them realistically position themselves relative to the characters.
This is one of the reasons why I did the switch to opengl all that time ago, I wanted to attach depth buffers to the map since doing it in software was impossibly slow. This technique runs at the usual 60fps since it’s all on the GPU.
This took me 2 days of struggling with stupid specifications of opengl (since, for example, you cannot glBlitFramebuffer to the display using the depth bits, you must use a canvas FBO) that weren’t exactly spelled out anywhere. But I did it.
I need to go do something simple. Probably go back to putting in combat abilities, or just go insane. Totally insane.
