LazyTomato
Member
So I'm working on a platformer... A platformer where I wanted to have more "free" terrain, not bound to tilesets and grids and the like.
And so I decided to use asset layers to make up the visual part of the terrain, since it seemed just appropriate for this; just have sprites for the terrain, both the flat colors and the details, and spread them around in asset layers to make up the terrain on top of the invisible collision pieces.
And that works perfectly, of course, there's just one issue.
And that issue is that, well, using basic flat color pieces for the bulk of the terrain doesn't really look good at the edges without an outline that marks the end of the terrain (and outlines would also match the game's artstyle, since it's going to be hand-drawn)
I thought to resort to shaders, since I know for a fact these can be assigned to asset layers; I'm already using one to darken terrain pieces set in the background, so players can make out what's actual terrain and what's decoration (see spoiler).
So those kinds of shaders work fine, but when I tried using an outline shader (following the classic examples of those on the community), it just didn't work; it didn't do anything.
Granted, outlines work perfectly on actual objects, but assigning said shader to an asset layer just straight up doesn't work (again, the image above is an example of the lighter terrain blocks, flat and outlineless).
I think I can safely assume this is because of asset layer shaders being handled differently than on actual objects with their own sprites?
And if that's the case, is there any alternative? Could I somehow automate that terrain outlining process in some other way? Or would i have to use even more sprites to do the outlining manually? (...which would be doable, but would take an insane amount of work for larger maps)
And so I decided to use asset layers to make up the visual part of the terrain, since it seemed just appropriate for this; just have sprites for the terrain, both the flat colors and the details, and spread them around in asset layers to make up the terrain on top of the invisible collision pieces.
And that works perfectly, of course, there's just one issue.
And that issue is that, well, using basic flat color pieces for the bulk of the terrain doesn't really look good at the edges without an outline that marks the end of the terrain (and outlines would also match the game's artstyle, since it's going to be hand-drawn)
I thought to resort to shaders, since I know for a fact these can be assigned to asset layers; I'm already using one to darken terrain pieces set in the background, so players can make out what's actual terrain and what's decoration (see spoiler).
So those kinds of shaders work fine, but when I tried using an outline shader (following the classic examples of those on the community), it just didn't work; it didn't do anything.
Granted, outlines work perfectly on actual objects, but assigning said shader to an asset layer just straight up doesn't work (again, the image above is an example of the lighter terrain blocks, flat and outlineless).
I think I can safely assume this is because of asset layer shaders being handled differently than on actual objects with their own sprites?
And if that's the case, is there any alternative? Could I somehow automate that terrain outlining process in some other way? Or would i have to use even more sprites to do the outlining manually? (...which would be doable, but would take an insane amount of work for larger maps)