Wednesday Delight

A Sweet & Sour Day

No I am not having a Chinese meal, I am summarizing my adventure from testing the all new 'integrated' batch buffer and occlusion system. I swapped in the required code, made sure it did what it was supposed to do at the time it was supposed to do it in, and LO, I went from 24fps to 29fps. Sigh.

You can almost imagine the OOOs and AAAs in the meeting on Thursday when I display my 5fps increase for all the office to see!  That was the sour.

The Sweet

I decided to pick my confidence off the floor and start from the beginning, creating a flat landscape and then populating it with a few hundred high polygon trees.  My current Beta 1.002 update rendered the amazing vista at 42fps (with everything switched off) and an astounding 10 fps with everything switch on. I re-instated my new code which optimizes the terrain and uses the triple whammy of GPU occlusion, geometry batching and QUAD system and my new statistics on the exact same level was 100fps with everything on and 155fps with everything switched off.  Silence.  Basically, a 1000% increase in performance for that level :)

Lee's New Mission

I still have to sort out some textures for the quad polygons and maybe fiddle with the transition distances (ultimate for a new slider), but I had a new mission from my mixed results.  I was going to account for every draw call and every rogue performance metric in the system, to find out WHY my run-to-the-river level is not showing the same increase in performance.  As you can tell, I am not quite finished with the 'make the engine seriously fast' work, and hopefully you can bear with me as we go from small victory to small victory in the pursuit of a decent games engine.

Signing Off

I am conscious of the fact I have a 7AM wake-up call tomorrow so I cannot indulge in a large blog post :)  All in all, pretty happy with my performance boost on some levels, and I know pretty much what I am doing over the next few days to get some more!!