Thursday 24 July 2014

Testing Testing Testing

Preparing V1.008 build, and today we've done more testing than coding, and that's saying something. More testing Friday too, looking for show stoppers and solid reproducibles.  A short blog today as I have an evening shift to get through, but I wanted to share a picture as promised.


One of my pet peeves to be tackled when I start the V1.009 work is the way terrains are textured. Right now a single channel controls which of the five textures should be painted to the ground. Unfortunately this means there can be zero overlap of arbitrary paint types and you get a sequential blend through the texture range. I will be thinking about how I can provide a good blending system for terrain textures without incurring more performance hit or requiring more resources. Eventually the goal is that you could blend the dark grey coal texture directly into the light pave texture without stomping through the immediate moss, mid and grass textures.  Using several channels of a texture slot would do it, but I don't have too many of them to spare, and I am using all 16 texture slots for terrain!! I could plum for 32 slots but I think some cards would fail at that, slow down the render even more and no-one will thank me for it.  There is a way (several I guess) I just need to think one up!  No blog Friday evening as I am leaving the country and passing through another for the weekend, but will resume and return on Monday to help answer any V1.008 release questions!

19 comments:

  1. don't the performance is already taking a hit in 1008.

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    1. ^ poor reply (and im being very nice to you)

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    2. How is that a poor reply? He's just saying Lee shouldn't move to using 32 texture slots because the performance is already struggling in 1008. The grammar's not great but then neither is yours.

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  3. The way terrains are painting could use a bit of a tune up that's for sure.

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  4. Your leaving the country? Oh you must have finished the tunnel you were digging in the yard!:)

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  5. I would like to see the lines removed from the terrain and less repetitive the lines span as far as you can see making it look like a runway ;)

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  6. Yes I think with an improved texture blending system you can paint out these patterns, but perhaps we could implement some system where a procedural algorithm paints in a blend between two texture types in a non-uniform way to improve the visual of the default terrain so you don't see lines (ever).

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    1. You do realise that most games simply use a less noticeable texture, right? That texture looks good by itself, but when repeated it has too much large detail.

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  7. Whilst you are on the terrain, can you come up with a way to increase the size please. My real-life terrain I want to recreate needs to be at least 2 kilometres long, and I'm pretty sure the current extent is about 1.3 Km. Ideally we should be able to specify the size at creation time.

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    1. agree, and while working on terrain, i think, should be a good idea start finding a way to go through the terrain layer (for bunkers, bases, caves and so on)

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  9. Is it just me or is progress slow! I haven't been on for a month nor played it and nothing has happened. I'm well aware that these things take time but betas should move a bit quicker. By time this thing is finished its going to be old gen, and it already looks old gen . Progress seems to be slowly dribbling at the moment and I can only hope that once the performance part is finished that things will speed up.

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  10. So I was thinking, caves and things in skyrim and oblivion had a nice sub editor for creating their indoor scenes. I would love to see further down the track, an indoor editing suit for the software to allow for such creaton.

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    1. I assume you mean "suite".

      Ah, time to get out my Indoor Editing Tux... :P

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    2. Yeah, whoops I should of read over :p

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    3. Look, I'm just gonna be That Guy. It's "should have", not "should of". People say "should of" because "should've" sounds like that, but it's a contraction of "should have".

      I tried to ignore it, but.... it just annoyed my OCD too much.

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    4. My god your anal about internet grammer.

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    5. Yes.

      Yes, I am.

      Must- not- correct- mistake- in- latest- post! *grabs one arm with other and forces away from keyboard with violent struggle*

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