Hmm, upgrades.

2011-11-23 11:14:46
DEV BoyC
18 comments
Tags: engine, shaders, terrain, upgrade

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:

After:

Comments for this post

1 Annihilator

2011-11-23 11:33:05

hmm, NICE!

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

2 Baal

2011-11-23 11:41:27

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

3 Trap Card

2011-11-23 13:51:48

shiny

4 Brick Moses

2011-11-23 14:53:35

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

5 elric

2011-11-23 18:07:41

What effect will this have on client cpu use

6 DEV BoyC

2011-11-23 19:43:56

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

2011-11-24 05:43:10

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

8 Obi Wan Kenobi

2011-11-24 15:45:19

HMMMMM SEXY :)....

9 Celebro

2011-11-24 16:26:16

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

Now where's the big blog?

10 Celebro

2011-11-24 16:29:35

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

11 DEV BoyC

2011-11-24 16:36:13

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

2011-11-24 22:12:47

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

13 Hugh Ruka

2011-11-25 05:23:19

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

14 DEV BoyC

2011-11-25 11:03:50

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

2011-11-26 17:19:08

"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

2011-11-26 17:21:48

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

2011-12-03 22:54:55

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. :)