Sunday Christmas Holiday #3

Still Not At Work

Another unofficial blog to close off 2013. Probably going to have a few days away from the PC next week before the slog of 2014 begins in earnest.  To close off nicely, I have added a few more things.

More Non-Performance Bits

The crouch now works within the physics system properly so you can crawl under things, given the enemies a little more strength and connected weapon damage statistics to the shots so different weapons deal a specific amount of damage, solved the culling issues for static batching when things like tree veg is used where culling is not welcome, sky now updates when you enter test game depending on the previously selected choice and one or two small internal tweaks.

The most fun feature added was that I sorted the weapon firing physics, so now the weapons apply forces to the dynamic objects, can detect when solid objects block bullets, no longer shoots all characters in line of the weapon shot, added decal blood for character hurt points and dust flumes for all solid impacts that are non-organic.

Signing Off

Once I added blood decals for characters and gave them more strength, it was VERY apparent that I need the characters to react properly when I shoot them. Right now a decal spraying from them is not a convincing effect any more, and we need some kind of per-limb or general hurt animation to show they have been wounded.  As I have not done ragdoll yet, when I implement this I might find a solution there to create some good reaction effects. The cheat of course is a few extra character animations for basic body parts like head shot, body, arms, legs, e.t.c.  

Still, with the additions from today it's really starting to liven up with crates being shotgun blasted and blood flying everywhere as the player gets ganged up on.  Found myself doing a 'lot' of testing, that is, running around shooting dynamic kettles over and over again :)

Saturday Christmas Holiday #2

Still On Holiday

Spending much time playing Bioshock Infinity, eating food and chilling out. Started the day at 12:15AM (midnight) and ended the day with this blog around 4:30PM. Added lovely non-performance treats to Reloaded:

Sky Scrolling Support - Artists can add scrolling sky

Water splashes and ripples - Shooting water produces a splash

Flashlight now assigned to F key - Switch on a cone of light at will


HUD Directional blood splat damage - Directional indicator and blood splats hit the screen when the player is hurt

More work around the decal engine and bullet ray cast so bullets create a decal flume of dust when the bullet hits the terrain. Next will be bullets that can detect solid surfaces such as buildings and dynamic stuff like crates. Also makes sense to add a little blood splat on the characters too when they are hit, and allow them to be hit a few times before they drop.

With the extra decal work, scrolling sky, blood splats and better up-close combat it's starting to pull together nicely now.  Plenty more to come of course, but my minds-eye can see the mighty oak it will eventually become.

Signing Off

First official day back at TGC is 2nd February (January-Ed) 2014 so watch that space for a more bulky blog post. I had only intended to do a full year of daily blogging for 2013, and it's had it's share of controversy during it's time.  Have not decided whether to continue a daily one for 2014, or make it more of a twice weekly post with more pertinent content (and less waffle).  We'll see :)

Monday Christmas Holiday #1

What Are You Doing Here?

As you may know, I have officially clocked off TGC hours until January 2nd, so I repeat, why are you reading today's blog? Are you expecting me to stop my little holiday and carry on working for you, endlessly, without rest, forever?

My Christmas Listening Recommendation

I found Jose earlier Christmas Album on YouTube, and liked it so much I bought his new one (which he and his family created 22 years later).

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/josemarichan14

My hope is that some of the royalties get back to him as I do like to reward creativity when I can afford to fit it into my universe.  Some of his songs (old and new), are so Christmas-sing-a-long-able, and now I have him on a loop in my office it feels like a Christmas office ;)

What I Done So Far

I have given myself permission to work on some non-Performance stuff as it's my holiday away from the day job.  I have added the decal engine back in, added muzzle flash on character weapons, entities now respect the SCALE field when in test game, physics now machine independent so player jump now works normally, characters can no longer be penetrated (oh er), characters now fight melee better and player now gets knocked back when struck with some cool camera tilt action too.

Signing Off

I am quite excited to do more decal related work, so things like water splashes, bullet impacts, blood splats, this sort of thing. Not for any reason of priority, just because I have one email in my inbox that's had water splash decal textures in there for months and I want to get rid of it :)  Hope your Christmas is going well so far!

Friday Ho Ho Ho

The Last Day - Officially

According to the spreadsheet I laughably call my Holiday Calender, this is the last TGC work day.  Being CEO and Founder, you might think I would not bother with such a regimented system for recovery and rest, but it's all part of the magical machine. 

I say officially because I don't imagine, in my wildest dreams, that I am actually going to clock off this evening and then return to work on the 2nd January 2014.  I am pretty sure my time between here and there will be occupied between playing some FPS games and adding to our FPS creator :)

In testing the latest beta, due later today, I found myself in 'play mode' and came up with this shot:

I started to imagine all sorts of cool things such as shop keepers I could trade items with, civilians walking about minding their own business, ladders so I could get to the roof tops, closed and locked doors and windows I could bash or pick open, the sounds of the night and the daily buzz of a small village, some creepy zombies hiding in the shadows, dynamic lighting effects for camp fires, lanterns, shop interiors and glowing eyed vampires, dust and tumble weeds kicking about in small wind swirls, maybe some light rain causing the cobbles to slowly reflect the buildings above, cloth physics hangings draped from open doorways and windows.  All this was swimming in my head as I wondered around my completely empty village, and it was exciting to know that most of the hard work is either behind me or in my immediate sights. I knew 2014 would be the year when all my imaginary features would slowly transform the reality of the engine, and found myself tempted to start all of them at once.

Of course the reality is that I am but one person, and I chose a very small team to help me get there.  For this I apologize, and beg your patience as I build this edifice one brick at a time.  I want this castle to stand the test of time. Other coders thought I was daft to build a castle here, but I built it anyway. It sank into the swamp. So I built another one,  that sank into the swamp. I built a third one...that burned down, fell over then sank into the swamp. But the forth one stayed up, and that's what you're going to get from me, the strongest castle in these isles.

BETA TIME

I am presently putting final touches and testing to the 1.004 BETA version, set for release later tonight, which I think you will approve as a good version to play with over Christmas.  As I hinted, I will be continuing the development over the festive season, focusing a little more on some critical yet fun stuff like more sounds, basic logic that's missing and any critical horrors that are found with 1.004 in December.

I have not decided whether this minor Christmas patch will be for GOLD pledgers only, as it falls outside the scheduled releases, so if you're not a GOLD pledger I strongly advise you to pledge now while the discount is in effect so you can get your hands on this 'potential' fun update ;)

Signing Off

Still plenty hours in my day so will carry on testing and tweaking. It's 6:44PM here in the UK and I aim to start uploading the final installer for 1.004 around 10PM so wherever you are in the world, do the time-zone math and get ready for a new update!

Thursday All Nighter

True Imposters Integrated

I had a deadline of having an internal testing version for Thursday morning, and due to the nature of the remaining work I had to work through. I started what I thought was a simple clean-up and integrate at 3PM on Wednesday and have just now finished at 7AM on Thursday (with about two hours break). As this is technically a lot of my Thursday energy used up, I thought I would make my blog now, just in case I sleep through the rest of the day.

It was grueling, but managed to solve the occlusion popping issue and tame the quad renderer in time to make an installer and upload.  The quad stuff was a real challenge and included a LOT of stuff I had not really considered such as regenerating based on various camera factors, requiring multiple quad buffer data structures for each camera and the balance between per-cycle workload and overall performance in real terms.  Fortunately, much vexing and trial and error solved the issues and I was able to come up with something passable.

Quad Visuals

I am still not entirely happy with the transition effect between the LOW LOD model geometry and the QUAD imposter, one because there seems to be some lighting differences between the two renders and also due to the clipping thresholds which will need to be model specific rather than hard coded into the shader.  I am pretty sure the lighting is due to incorrect use of shadow and dynamic lighting, both of which I can either simulate in the quad render or alternatively, to fade the LOW LOD render slowly into the lighting attributes which the quad uses. The former is more desirable, but may have a cost given their distance from the player camera.

Remaining Things

The goal of a 1.004 beta for Friday night is now very reasonable to achieve given the work just done. I have a few tweaks I want to get in, such as saving the slider settings between sessions, and perhaps some way to reset them. The question of whether they should be saved with the level files, or saved globally is something I should like to think on. I suspect both, but I will need to come up with a system that is intuitive and not clumsy.

There are some other tweaks that are less important, but would transform the overall look and sound of the beta to give it a nice feel, but we will see how much actual time I have for these trinkets.

Signing Off

Hopefully I can get the larger bitmap fonts for the ammo and health numeric before the update as I think it would improve the in-game stat panels quite a lot.  Eventually we will have a lot more stat panel choices, but for now I am aiming for something generic and functional, also clean and polished so it would not look out of place in any modern game.  There are some other graphics in the wings too, but I will leave those as a surprise for when you get the next beta update!

Wednesday Walk

Yes, And No

It is true that I went for another walk today, but this time I came straight back and did not go to sleep :)  I gave myself one hour before dinner to finish off the prototype with communal textures which will allow me to populate a single texture with many quad texture renders. It's now two hours and I've just finished the quad texture regeneration system and not even started on the communal multi-render stuff. Just goes to show how even a simple developer task can be broken down into small unpredictable extra work that had no previous time estimate assigned.

Imagine, a task that I did not even think about, and did not have a time estimate for, taking twice as long as the task I started to do. Now multiply that few hours with those in week, and then an entire project and you will get a sense of how an estimate and reality can differ. I set myself an hour as I was famished, and as I write this I am doubly famished. Will stop now and eat, then return to do the task I set myself at 5PM :)

Signing Off

In the two hours of quad regeneration work however I tracked down some bugs in the engine which caused HIGH and MEDIUM LOD objects to render over each other which was rather redundant, and introduced the system which only renders the quad texture when it absolutely needed to be done. I also found that I needed to update the quad vertices each cycle in order to keep the quad polygons rendering to the screen smoothly.  Whether this will effect overall performance when we start locking hundreds of buffers, we will see, but I wanted to achieve super-smooth AND speed. When we have some real world levels to throw at it, we can then decide to keep speed and have the quads stepping along, or keep smooth, and sacrifice some speed.  One of the many thousands upon thousands of tiny decisions that do into making a games engine.

Also got an email with a prototype showing some rather nifty player hurt, directional damage and blood splatting effects. I am now resisting the urge to play with that integration (five minutes work which is actually five hours work) and remain focused on two objectives. Finish the prototype for engine integration and solve the object popping caused by occlusion. I can then prepare an installer for some internal testing before a planned release for the weekend. I think you will like this update, we have lots of tweaks in there!

Tuesday Got IMPOSTERS!!

And Phew!

At long last, today I saw my first peek at the working technology of true imposters within my static batching and occlusion system.

Impressive I know!  So what are you looking at?  Well the blue square is the background color of the camera and nothing to get excited about. The red square is our quad imposter which has been calculated automatically based on the position of the camera and the target object. The building in the center is the target object and it is being rendered via the imposter pixel for pixel exactly where the real model would have been rendered. Instead of hundreds of polygons, there are now just two.

Shadows About To Get Fast

The reason I show you a view from above is that this is the perspective the shadow light sees objects from. By using imposters when rendering the shadow objects, we will vastly accelerate the entire shadow drawing cycle too. Not forgetting the reflection views and light ray cameras!

Signing Off

I still have to do some finishing off and house-keeping, and of course add multiple target objects per communal texture, and then get it integrated into the main engine, but the crazy math part has been done, which is a big relief for me.  The immediate goal for Wednesday is to stop the popping effect currently vexing the Reloaded community, but the side effect of solving that should be some additional performance improvements.  That, together with the shader panel, might be enough performance to allow us to shift the percentage over to some non PPP work, such as player damage, enemy strengths and some improving tweaks.

Monday Halved

Four Hours With The Secret Coder

A good early start to Monday preceded a marathon four hour conversation as I prepped the new coder for his first foray into the Reloaded engine. Covering everything from brand vision and project scope through to coding style and the new DBP compiler.  He is now armed with most of the tools he needs to produce something cool for Reloaded.

The Walk

I then went for a walk before dinner, which turned into a long walk and I only got back at close to 5PM, picking my car up en-route from the garage. After some refreshment I suddenly felt fatigued so had myself an early night.

Signing Off


For some reason, my previous entry for Monday was half-deleted and unpublished, so I am publishing it again now. Hopefully it will stay undeleted long enough for you to read Monday's capers.

Sunday Weekend @ Work

Busy Busy

As the weekend was populated by rain and wind, and wrapping presents, I decided to give a few hours over to some coding to make up for any lost hours during the week gone.  Turns out Saturday I clocked in over 12 hours and made some nice improvements. 

We have been internally building a list of priority A bugs that need fixing, but performance came in at an even higher priority so these duties where postponed. Performance is still in the works, but with my recent success with shader reduction I decided to knock a few of the more undesirable issues off the list and improve the engine.

What Improvements?

The most striking is that you now have a weapons and health HUD panel when you place down a Start Marker, fully functional with final graphics. I am not too happy with the size of them, and the font used, but otherwise it's in the ball-park. To take screen shots, simply remove the start marker from the scene (or don't start with a weapon and set health to zero).

As you have read, the start marker weapon is now respected so you can start with a weapon and ammo, the weird bar at the bottom of the test game screen has been removed (a real pig that one), foliage no longer causes collision issues or AI obstacles to be created, allowing the character to run through low grasses and shrubs. Lots of little tweaks you probably won't pick up on but had sat in the list for a good while and was starting to alloy me.

The Secret Coder

I have logged on Sunday for one purpose, which is to prepare some files for a new coder to the Reloaded camp. His mandate is simple enough, and for the moment I will keep his task secret, but he brings with him as much experience at coding as I have (which means he's an old git like me).

At the start of the year, I re-designed the new Reloaded engine to allow modules to be worked on independent of the main code. This has been used to fashion small prototypes that could quickly implement and test sub-modules of the main engine and allow super rapid development. The system now lends itself to allowing another coder to share things like the data structures and common helper subroutines, but implement a wholly separate piece of code which can drop into the main engine without resource or coding conflicts.  It is this system that will be tested over the next few weeks.

The bottom line is that you now have 'potentially' two Lee's working on Reloaded, and I will be happy to report the results of this experiment.

Classic Makes Good

A bit of retro news for you. The original product FPS Creator Classic was created many (many) years ago and has been responsible for some great games. Two such examples have made it into the top 100 IndieDB charts and is now spoiling for a top award. The games need votes, and every vote is one for the FPSC brand, so I invite you to go and help the author click his way up the ladder.

http://www.indiedb.com/events/2013-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote16039

http://www.indiedb.com/events/2013-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100#vote25758

My hope is that in years to come, Reloaded will be the instrument that will allow many users to create IndieDB chart topping games, showing the same level of customization as 'Into the Dark' and 'Into the Ice' reveals.

Signing Off

With shaders (for the moment) done, on Monday I will be returning to the subject of QUADs (True Imposters) and finishing what I started. I could readily leave this out for the next update if it was not for the fact that objects are popping in and out of existence. A handy quad will resolve this visual artifact and at the same time move us in the right direction. A substantial byproduct of this work will be the acceleration of the shadow, light-ray and reflection renderers which means high-end users are going to get even higher. I could do the work today, but I think it makes sense to have at least half a day off, maybe playing some relevant FPS game to stay tuned to the overall goals of this tool.

Steam Is Green

One of our ambitions is to get Reloaded onto Steam, which means getting a Green Light, helped along with public votes. We are off to a flier, but need to keep the momentum going. If you know anyone with Steam, invite them to check out the page and see if they would also like to see Reloaded reach millions of new FPS players (and budding creators):

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=203481310

Also, if you have ideas how we can improve our steam page, description, shots, videos, e.t.c do get in touch!

Friday Fun

The Storm After The Calm

A good rest does one a world of good, and I started at noon today and just finishing off now at 45 minutes past midnight, so a good long stint. Made a huge boo-boo half way through when I realized I was operating from two different source code bases and in danger of loosing some work from some unspecified number of days. Fortunately WinDiff came to my rescue and I once again had the best of both worlds compiling as normal.

As you can see, a new Shader Panel has emerged which can set the terrain to MEDIUM, which retains the texturing and fog effects, but removes normals and shadows from the mix. I plan to continue working on this shader level, plus add a few more so that you have a good selection of visual options that represent the best compromise between visuals and performance.

So What's Been Done

The shader panel, which has been my sole goal today, is now refined and working well. It can step right down to the most basic of Pixel Shader 2.0 shaders, allowing us to get a real feel for the performance 'starting point' for low-end devices.  High end effects are unaffected for those with meaty systems, but I am hopeful that my shader work at the lower end will start to show some real gains.  From these benchmarks, I can decide which visual effects to promote into the shader until we basically run out of GPU cycles.

Too Ultra

I am already getting super frame rates on my Ultrabook now, so I decided to dig out a Windows Surface Tablet (Intel ATOM processor using a GMA chip). As a point of comparison, running the 1.003 software fully loaded AND at low settings I got 1-2fps, and was essentially un-usable.  I am not sure yet whether this should be a platform to target, but I do know there will be a lot of devices out there at this processor level and you can imagine some users will want to play their FPS games on the Windows Tablet.  I am not going to obsess over this far end of the spectrum, but I will be very interested to see what basic shaders and a massive reduction in polygons would yield here. If the engine was able to create and play games at this level, it would effectively span any type of system you might have and create a very accessible solution.  We will see...

Signing Off

My last task for the week will be to build an installer from this version which has the shader panel and then try on a few systems I have here.  It will also be a stand-by version should the QUAD work which is next week turn out to be a nightmare (again).  I also plan to do a little over the weekend to make up for my transient life earlier this week.

I must also thank Rodrigo for his suggestions for shader improvements, who went to the trouble of going through all the shaders and documenting small savings which no doubt will add up to a few extra FPS units for some of you guys out there.  I am sure the community will want to thank you as well!

We Want Your Vote

One last thing before I go. I noticed in our new Voting System that Performance is scoring less than the Character Creator feature :)  

http://fpscrvote.thegamecreators.com/

Fortunately I started Performance work so that box is being actively developed now, but it was interesting to note that you are using your votes to push a new feature into the engine ahead of more performance. It will be interesting to see how the chart moves after BETA 1.004 :)

We Want Your GREEN Vote Too

Today we also launched our bid to get a Green Light on Steam, which would open the doors to a lot more eyeballs and interest in what we are building. I encourage you to check it out, sign in and click YES to Reloaded's invasion of Steam :)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=203481310

I am not sure how many YES votes we need, but once I get some statistics from somewhere, I will keep you updated on how we are fairing there!!

Thursday Slumber

...he slept muchly that day...tune in Friday night for more exciting tales...

Wednesday Has A Shader Panel

Mobile Coding

A strange thing using the Ultrabook as a daily coding machine, not being able to reach for my mouse and relying on arrow keys so small you need laser guided fingers to hit them :)  Still, it's quite liberating, and in a way forces me to think more consciously of users who use these types of devices as their main machine. Which I think is a good thing to be thinking about!

The Progress

We now have a shader panel in the software which can control terrain, entity and vegetation shader levels. That is, select from a range of techniques from HIGHEST which is everything plus the kitchen sink down to LOWEST which is the most basic rendering path you can imagine.  I have read the comments about whether time should be given to the lowest of the low systems, but I figure this low end work ultimately benefits the high end result (as it will get faster as small corrections and refinements at the basement level iterate upwards to the lofty heights we enjoy in mid-range land).

Signing Off

Almost completed my exile from the office, and should be writing the next blog from my PC beast.  I am pretty confident BETA 1.004 will deliver sizable performance increases for those who have yet to see their FPS value budge. I DO think it's important that lower end users can run at a decent speed, and get to enjoy game creation and play back, even if their visuals are not as drop dead gorgeous as the high end ones. Let's face it, users invest in spending LOTS on high end equipment so they CAN see better bigger faster visuals.  Once the majority of the Reloaded community is off the ground and flying with the software (and not stuck in the mud at 10 fps), we can then address the concerns over visual touches and tricks to recover those aspects you feel are important at the low end.  You can probably sense my approach to working, in that when I say top priority is given to performance, I pretty much exclude all else to that end.  I was reminded of this fact by Rick on Tuesday, in that I am even excluding features that used to work (and the fixes that would remedy those changes).  Rest assured as soon as shader panels and quads are in and working fully, the remaining time will be spent triple checking everything that used to work still works, and we have a successful 'positive' update ;)

Tuesday Meet Up

Out And About

As you may know today was a meeting day so between driving and talking, not much left in the tank for coding tonight. I did show off that speed increases are possible on integrated systems with room to spare, which means we can retain some level of visual fidelity in the modified shaders.

It is not realistic to get ALL the effects, running ALL shaders at white hot speeds on low-end hardware and expect high frame rates to compete with the mid and high end systems.  There MUST be compromise. The trick is in compromising those shader hungry effects that are not immediately apparent, thus allowing performance to increase without significantly affecting the end shot.

My jibe at removing EVERYTHING from the shader was really just to highlight my starting point, from the point of view of performance. The work now is to introduce shadows, texture variations, normal mapping and other elements in an efficient way, and as there is no one solution here I will probably opt for several shader levels to choose from. It will then be up to the individual creator what settings they prefer for making games, and what settings they recommend and preset for their users.

The End User

We will be having option screens so the end user of your game can likewise choose which shaders are employed for best results, and during the meeting we talked briefly about being able to 'post' recommended settings filed by graphics card name so new users of Reloaded and it's standalone games to quickly find and apply the best settings as discovered by fellow members of the community.

Signing Off

I plan to work on bringing the basics back into the terrain shader Wednesday as I am pretty sure can restore unfiltered shadows and terrain selection without hurting performance, and I have a question whether you can really appreciate the normal mapping as you're running through a level (and more importantly, whether it's worth the few FPS it costs to render them on low-end systems). Similar measures can then be applied the entity, weapon and other-game render surfaces. Combine these with the savings on scene and terrain polygons, we might start to see some serious improvements for many Reloaded users.  

Whether the sacrifice of visuals is apparent or welcome is the subject of another discussion, but it may be possible to supplement any short falls with some pre-baking. Many modern games that run on low-end positively depend on various forms of pre-baking to get the performance you expect, whereas Reloaded is attempting a complete real-time engine with zero-pre-baking.  In laymen terms, pre-baking is sitting and waiting for your level to 'build', and something I really want to avoid for as long as possible, and hopefully find a nice solution that satisfied the majority.

P.S. If...

Anyone wants to have a look at my terrain shader (in effectbank/reloaded/) and suggest how it can be made 'more efficient' without loosing 'any' of the visual effects, please do get in touch ;)

Monday Ultra Look

An Ultrabook Day

Normally I plant myself into a seat facing a mid-range PC. Today I am in front of a Ultra-mobile PC experience typing from my lap. My mission was to see what I could gain from an integrated graphics chip, and the best way was to use one to do the testing and tweaking.

Shader Slicer

I began and ended my work chopping up the shaders until they started to return performance. The bottom line is that I went from 18 fps to 40 fps by reducing the complexity of the shader, and when I switched off some of the features I got upwards of 70 fps with a terrain and some characters running about.

It is fair to say my shader slicing removed some things you might have wanted to keep such as multiple textures, normals, shadows and other small effects but the experiment was to see 'WHO' was spending the frame rate.

It was clear that on an integrated (and I suspect low end card), that the shader is real bottleneck here and it's a case of figuring out which things I can keep and which things I cannot have to get the performance and visuals that pleases. I dare say some pre-baked processing and hacking would be required to get the visuals on lower end systems, but it's a great start to see the performance hit 90 fps in some cases on what is essentially a fan-less graphics chip!

Signing Off

I still have some reductions to chase through quads, reduced terrain polygons and some more occlusion tricks but it is clear to me now that it's the shaders themselves which slow down the non-mid range graphics solutions. From this info I can add a few extra settings to the slider system to allow these ideas to be tried on the variety of low end systems out there.

Sunday Shaderthon

Revelations Chapter One

Spent a little time today on a different tact from the usual chase of fewer polygons and draw calls, and made my home on the Ultrabook I often use when I am about and out. My latest effort did quite well at 15 fps fully loaded and over 40 fps on silent running, and together with some anecdotal evidence from one of our beta testers, it occurs that perhaps there is gain to be had by chopping down the shaders after all (as right now they are consuming over 85% of my Ultrabook processes). I tried this before but tested on my monster mid range card and so no benefit. I started to suspect I WOULD have seen a benefit had I tried it on my mobile computer!

The Work

Therefore, my work for Sunday evening will be to trim the shaders directly on the Ultrabook and see what gains are to be had. If they report well, then it is very likely this solution will work for many users in the same boat as a few respected testers who have reported almost no performance improvement since I started my antics. Hopefully this is the key that unlocks that door to happiness.

Signing Off

I am on the road over the next few days so my blogs may come from strange places. My mission will be to continue working on performance, through better use of draw calls, polygons and now shader code. I know it can seem like nothing new is being done, but I can assure you, and I think I have a few supporters who will agree from long experience, that the absence of 'new things' in this case is a very good thing.  Keeping Lee on performance until we crack the case shows that we've learned something from products of the past and brave enough to stick to our gun.

Friday Progresso

Some Good Math

A quick blog today to say I have now gone through the new maths for True Imposters and quad texturing, and it's all pretty plain sailing now. I am still in the prototype dealing with front facing and top down facing quads, all of which need to be in the engine before I move to the main software, but it's going well. I plan to do some work over the weekend so I have my quad system in place for Monday week. Have 'another' meeting on Tuesday and want to show off the result of this little side track into the world of strange imposters.

Signing Off

Might be a Saturday/Sunday blog to make up for this short one, so check back over the weekend in case there is a surprise for you :)

Thursday Email Mountain

The Email Tractor Beam

It's funny how some days you can get a lot of coding done, and other days you can get none done. Ever since I clocked on around 1PM (slowly getting back to day shift) I have been answering emails, writing 'Ask Lee' answers, writing up reports, reading articles, Google pinging and sketching out little paper ideas, I've not had any actual code time :(  

I have got some good news in that the recent 60 FPS performance work has now been tested on a few other internal team systems and the improvement is definitely measurable.  This bodes very well for the next BETA update and so I can promise you have something to look forward to!

Signing Off

The good news is that I've been thinking of the imposter system so much the actual work should not take too long (in theory).  Going to have something to eat and then see if I can get a few hours of coding in, and hopefully get a big result from my quads!

Wednesday 60 FPS Day

Performanciniaring

Another signature day in the saddle of the Good Horse Reloaded. As you know (owing to the unforgivable lack of a blog post yesterday) I was in Manchester on Tuesday having a meeting and in the process having a good time. Back in Wales now and the code fest continues, and seemingly as a result of my short break (and a rather nice Irish Coffee I had on Monday from a rather nice bar-dude) I have ACHIEVED one of my private goals of getting the 'Run To The River' level up to 60 fps!

And how did I manage that I hear you scream!  Well...first I fixed a bug which caused ALL the grass to render in the shadow camera renders, which is not required at all, and then second thing was to detect (using some occlusion commands I wrote a while ago) whether the water quad was rendering any pixels that where visible on the screen. If that value was zero, I skipped the reflection camera render.  These two measures saw me jump from 40 fps up to 60 fps and the end of one of my little goals.

A New Hope

I need a new 'mini' goal now of course. Not the usual stuff that we all know needs doing, just something I can giggle at when I've achieved it.  To keep it simple, my new goal is to get over 100 fps on the same sample level as I think it is reasonable to expect a small compound with a few buildings and characters in should not tax a professional games engine too much, and as the goal is not 'mandatory' it should make the achieving of it all the sweeter!

Signing Off

Another goal I'm aiming for is to get back on day shift. It's fair to say I'm not feeling any worse than I did last week, but my body does feel out of sorts. Going back on the old 9 to 5 is my first step to correcting this case of affairs, and as the time is 6:35 I'm going to clock off and get an early night. Thursday will see the final coding of the True Imposter system, but this time with some proper maths!!

Monday Jet Setting

Signing In

A very short day today, consisting of emails, this blog, packing some bits and then a nice drive to Manchester. I have a meeting all day Tuesday which might provide some extra ammo in the world of Reloaded. More news on this if the mission is successful.

Signing Out

Continuation of performance work will resume Wednesday, as it has been almost unanimously agreed that PPP should remain top of the list for the time being. The mileage of the results you may have got with BETA 1.003 will vary wildly and I am not too surprised at the reports of slowdown in some cases and substantial increase in others.

I suspect the slow down comes from lower-end systems which are having to do more CPU work to calculate occlusion, and on the GPU side building vertex buffers dynamically might upset some graphics cards which do not expect this approach. Many games would build the entire world as an optimized static soup of polygons, and NEVER build them in real-time. It could be that once we have identified and singled out a group of machines that are reacting negatively to dynamic building of static batches, we can use an alternative technique that best fits those cards.  If anyone can demonstrate a substantial slow-down of a side by side test of 1.002 and 1.003, please send me your CPU and graphics card details so I can start to get an idea which kinds of systems react in this way.