Hi everyone!

Over the last couple of weeks I experimented a bit with shaders, and ended up with some nice, gently moving and not too distracting backgrounds that float behind the tennis courts. Each court type (clay, grass and hard court) now has its own floating background, matching the colour of that court surface.

In addition to that, I implemented mouse-over animations for all buttons in the game (except for input fields and buttons that open drop-down menus). Hovering over a button is now more enjoyable, as it not only changes colour but also increases in size once the cursor touches it.

Other improvements:

• Replaced the net in the center of the court, which was previously just a single rectangular shape with weird looking transparent holes in between, with individual cylindric shapes. It now looks much better, especially when zooming in from an angle.
• Replaced large court surface textures with separate, smaller and square-shaped textures. This allows for higher resolution, which again results in better looks when zooming in, and reduced texture sizes.
• Added a slight, permanent wobble effect to target fields, to make them look less static.
• Some minor improvements (tennis court lights and shadows, robot surface materials, camera zoom in robot setup menu).

Hi everyone!

Quick update on the latest progress of Robot Tennis:

I didn’t like how the target fields just suddenly appeared on the court out of nowhere at the start of each player turn, and again suddenly disappeared at the end of the turn. It looked a bit cheap.

Hence I added some animation for each target field to smoothly expand onto the court when the player turn starts, and smoothly shrink back into the court once the player selected one of them (or decided to hold the robot position).

It is now much more fun to click on a target field, especially with that little random animation delay for each field and when the field size “overshoots” a bit at the end.