Friday Finally

Captain Sensible

In order to put my degenerating over-worked body on a better footing, I started today as normal as I could manage. Got up at 7AM, breakfast, work, dinner, work, finish up and test, upload.  Knowing full well the quad situation could easily soak up all my remaining daily hours, I decided to shift focus to getting a solid update ready for the Alpha Cascade. It's uploading for an internal test now, and then I will be ready to uploaded to the main FTP this weekend if Rick agrees that you can all enjoy the performance improvements so far. He's also prepared to delay the update a week in order to add more polish to the release before you get your hands on it, so watch this space for that!

What's In Store

As I did not find the time to code the auto-fence maker, I quickly added in the Game Creator Store feature with a few modifications for Reloaded.

In the shot above, I have taken a rather cool refinery looking construct from the store and added it to a simple level.  I took the liberty of marking the item as Reloaded compatible as I have since fixed the collision and orientation issues that originally prevented this model from working properly. It is also the first and only Reloaded approved model in the store right now, but rest assured more will quickly follow now the legacy support is going into the engine as each new issue is identified and resolved.

Some other issues such as static object collision has been improved so there is no more falling through ladders when you try to make a bridge out of them, you can now climb the staircase object and you can no longer sneak through invisible gaps in the fencing.  I am still dubious about the dynamic collision shapes, but when I have more objects to test against I can put those through the mill.

Signing Off

I have temporarily disabled quad rendering, and enabled extra low LOD static buffers. The shadow, reflection, light ray and the main camera all use these dynamic static batch buffers now so you should see some speed improvement. I once reported my 'run to the river' demo went from 24 to 29 then up to 50. Well it went back down to 42 once I re-activated some needed rendering code, but it's still heading in the right direction.

I have since learned some new techniques and have had a few ideas of my own to solve the final quad problem, so hopefully we can re-introduce quads next week to gain some more performance.  I also have a mind to add some code to the terrain system to replace a field of polygons with two polygons AND apply occlusion techniques to the terrain segments too, to see if that helps performance.

Although occlusion is in and working, I am not 100% happy with it yet. You will read in many occlusion articles that the momentary 'popping in' of objects once the engine has determined they should be visible is acceptable and barely noticeable. Having tested it for many days, I DO notice it and I DON'T find it acceptable. The solution will probably hog some performance as I suspect I will have to do a pre-draw with the occluded shapes, stall the GPU then draw the 'now visible' once-occluded objects. When you get hold of the update, check out the artifacts on this and do send me any links you find from anyone in the world who has solved this 'popping in' effect without huge GPU stalls.