A Day Of Deleting
As you may know the task this time is to finish the map editor editing system and then move swiftly onto some deferred rendering prototypes. Alas.
I made good progress with improving the map deletion code, which was 94% searching and 6% fixing due to insane reproducibles. One example would be use a large radius spray can to spray over an area of 100x100 grid tiles, then return to the initial corner and delete a few segments at random. The bug being that some will not delete. Now try reproducing that exactly so you can trace the hundred fold nests to see what the contents of arrays of floats buried behind double jump reference pointers. It's no picnic!
Some Good News
Even though deferred rendering is now a distant ambition for the weekend, it looks like I am very close to cracking the editor delete stuff and only have some low LOD issues to tackle (they don't go away when the high LOD is in play) and as the delete code only handles high LOD geometry, it makes it look like the tile was not deleted when in fact it's the low LOD I am now looking at.
To be fair though, adding and subtracting from buffers and a cascade of variations was always going to be a tricky one to test and refine, and when you mix in multiple overlapping buffers you know you're in for a world of pain. With a little luck, I can put these glitches on the fixed list and have a working editor come Monday.
Signing Off
Sorry no pictures today but everyone went home and left me with my programmer art hands. I have thrown out a few emails in order to get some content this week so watch this space for the graphical stuff :) For more technical headaches and insights, join me on Monday for more lovely ranting! Also, for the many new users who have subscribed to my YouTube channel, thanks muchly. I would ask though that you direct all your comment questions to the blog so I can answer everything in one place and have a single location for all answers Reloaded flavoured. Thanks again!
Lee, place a link to the blog in your video descriptions on You Tube. This will help users coming from You Tube to find your blog. You can also turn off comments to your videos if you so wish.
ReplyDeleteI've started adding a link in the most recent uploads, but I will look for the comment-off button during my next upload (unless the community feel the in-video comments contribute..
ReplyDeleteWith sich a big map what will happen with segments builings that are far away? Will they always be in view? Or lowered quality?
ReplyDeletesuch*
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, the buildings will be lowered quality when they're a long way off, and after a certain distance they will be eaten by fog and be no longer visible.
ReplyDeleteBtw Lee, we need to be able to control fog.
Just so, a fog will descend on distant geometry :) I also had the idea of a 'textured silhouette' engine which would replace the 'disappearing skyscrapers' with a contour of them on the horizon that wraps around the players view, so effectively no geometry 'pops out' of the users perception. I think we can look at this after Christmas though ;)
ReplyDeleteNow I _really_ like that idea! I normally think of every possible way to optimise stuff but I didn't think of that, and it's clever. Can't wait till after Christmas! :D
ReplyDelete