Here's a sneak peek of some of the upcoming shader 3 changes. Keep in mind that this is still heavily work in progress, and the final version will include even more upgrades. Shadows are deliberately turned off at the moment, these images show the level of changes upcoming to the terrain engine and the water renderer.

Before:

Before

After:

After

Comments for this post

1 Annihilator

hmm, NICE!

question: does the game engine do clipping of hidden vertexes? (hill backside that you dont see)

2 Baal

Looks good :) computer broken atm, cant wait to build a new one and turn everything on max settings =D

3 Trap Card

shiny

4 Brick Moses

The oryovia don't seem to notice. Such buzzkills.

5 elric

What effect will this have on client cpu use

6 DEV BoyC

Anni: yes backfaces are culled where they aren't needed. Also objects outside the camera frustum aren't processed, and there are a few other tricks we employ to ensure that only the things on screen are rendered.

Elric: most of the systems currently in the game overuse the cpu while the gpu is sitting there idling. These visual changes also focus on moving as much of the processing as possible from the cpu to the gpu to balance the workload. We're aiming to keep the performance needs of the game the same while making it look better.

7 Alexadar

Good to know you want to balance load between CPU and GPU

8 Obi Wan Kenobi

HMMMMM SEXY :)....

9 Celebro

Seems like a more warming hue and reflected lighting, look better.

Now where's the big blog?

10 Celebro

Being an amateur photographer.I can see your image composition in excellent great picture :)

11 DEV BoyC

Big blog will have to wait until we're finished with the first wave of changes. The sky and the lighting haven't been touched yet, those are up next.

12 Obi Wan Kenobi

can we has thunder clouds ? :D a little lighting to ? :P

13 Hugh Ruka

ah, so my game can move from being CPU limited to the GPU ? great.

14 DEV BoyC

Hugh: something ALWAYS is the bottleneck. The only case there isn't one is when there's nothing to do, which basically means the game isn't running.
It's a matter of balancing the workload so that if one part of the pipeline is making the rest wait we can stress the waiting parts more without any performance hit. As we have a lot more going on on the cpu side besides the rendering it makes sense to move as much of the rendering code from the cpu to the gpu as possible. This reduces some workload on the cpu and moves it to otherwise idling parts of the pipeline.

15 Annihilator

"Because of the tremendous gravitational pull involved, and Nia's particularly dense core, the planet generates surprisingly large amounts of static electricity in its oceans, making them highly dangerous to anything which uses electricity in any form: robots or more traditional human life. "

will we get some FX showing that part of the lore?

16 Steeldragonz

Also as we have been having a great discussion in general chat about this, an aurora borealis of some sort for the new sky texture would be fitting, if all life on Nia is a function of the oceans electrical current then a discharge into the sky isnt out of the unexpected.

17 Winter Solstice

What Anni said. Doesn't need to be anything more commonly timed than the dust-storms, but an occasional cloud-to-water (water-to-cloud) strike would look pretty neato. :)

18 MoBIoS

Looking forward to it. Good job.