Monday 31 March 2014

Another Entry In Smallest Blog Ever

Work

Worked right up to the 7PM wire today, started with the usual 9AM team call. Progressing very well with six hands at three keyboards fixing bugs like some coding orchestra! 


Just some quick eye candy from a small level I created to test that the older stuff still worked with the newer hacks and changes to improve performance and stability.

We're still grappling with the stutter issue, but we have DEFINITELY reproduced it now, and just need to figure out the root cause of it. There are other issues on our growing list for the next timely beta, but the stutter is the only remaining issue from our original plan.

I can also share that I have further improved the animating object system so that EVERYTHING is instance objects unless absolutely necessary which means you can paste down a TONNE of animating vegetables with no surge in memory usage or resource hiccups.  Of course animating all that through the shader would hit performance, but as always when it comes to content, your mileage will definitely vary.

Was another good day of coding, and with a huge testing effort all lined up to receive this beta version, we should ensure get something that works out the box (as far as our 1.006 ambitions go at least) ;)

10 comments:

  1. good to see and hear lee m8, keep it up :)

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  2. I'm on the edge of my seat! Like a kid waiting to open his Christmas Toys.

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  3. This makes me so happy Lee :) Thank you and the TGC team

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  4. We are on it folks! Lots done these past few days and a great team spirit.

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  5. You know what? It's about time you got more people in helping spread the load. One man can only do so much, and I'm sure mistakes can be made simply because of the pressure to produce. Also, good to have other people to discuss things with occasionally to help keep you on track. Developing in complete isolation can be a bit soul destroying sometimes. And I only do it for fun lol.

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  6. See that screenshot looks a lot better than any you've given us before Lee. No noticeable disgusting bloom effect, decent looking model and material and wonderful plants and a great colour scheme. It's not really next generation, more like sixth generation, Shadow of the Colossus style, but it's still a lot better than before. I wonder if you changed anything to achieve this?

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    1. It definitely looks better, but I think it's purely from the content side of things. If you open the image and view at full size, it's still blurry, which means Lee is still using the subpixel supersampling in the bloom shader. It's easy to disable, though, if you want to remove the full-scene blurring and just have the bloom.

      To remove the supersampling (which is like fake antialiasing), open the bloom shader and find this line:

      PixelShader = compile ps_3_0 PSPresent( frameSamp, Blur1ImgSamp, AvgLumFinalSamp );

      Change to this:

      PixelShader = compile ps_3_0 PSPresentClassic( frameSamp, Blur1ImgSamp, AvgLumFinalSamp );

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  7. Everything is looking good Lee

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  8. None of this will matter if you folks don't enable Vehicle movement, the game will never reach it's potential.! I just can't believe an FPSC creator wouldn't already have
    Vehicle involvement in the game. Also you folks need to recreate the arms and hands.
    They look ridiculous. Especially the left arm. No offense, but think about these things and also take a look at the arms...Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease...Vehicles Pleeeeeeeease
    razornet7@live.com bronze pledger...Fix these and I'll go Gold..Next beta date ???

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  9. @razornet7 these things you have mentioned cant come in until everything else is stable, patience is key here

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