Picture Blog Day

Been a great week and some very necessary fixes, including some performance gains and cleaner memory code.  I promised screenshots today so here they are:

 Above is the old V1.007 screenshot from the ESCAPE level

 Here is the new V1.009 screenshot tweaked with lower values to match above lighting

Don't worry about the FPS, I am using the HIGHEST terrain shader as the older one used normal maps for MEDIUM but the latest build does not.  As you can see, the HUD weapon is more defined, we now have shadows, the bloom is not as intense and it's a little more colorful.

Here you can see a level we are working on to test a larger world with more action, to ensure that our drive for performance never ends and we maintain a course which allows many types of FPS game to be created.  Still more polish in the game play and smaller items, but the level is definitely taking shape nicely!

Currently spent most of the day getting the F9 live terrain editing to work again, as consolidating the terrain physics geometry had the nasty side effect that I could not quickly swap in a new piece of terrain floor, I had to build the whole combination meshes again.  Currently battling with retaining my performance gain with ensuring F9 functionality remains in tact.  This evening I plan to make a build but I have a few issues to resolve before then including the restoration of shadows from trees and other transparent entities, and once the build is done I plan to spent my Friday night with some fun multi-core physics experiments. The single core system current takes about 11% of the overall game spend, which is not too bad I think, and there is always an overhead from adding n-core solutions, but really there is only one way to know for sure, and that's to break out the code and see what works best!

I am also pleased to report that the FPSC legend Mr Blosser has kindly conceded to help with some additional art work, and the first target for us will be the building.

As you can see, he has already started with some improved specular and normal maps, now looking at texture seams and other geometry based concerns.  It will also be the entity to help trial a new OCCLUSIONMESH system which should allow the occluder to process this entire building with just a few polygons for the whole shape.

Probably need to eat at some point today, but I have my second wind now so will crack on and see if I can put on task properly to bed so I can think clearly about the very important weekend build.  Have a great weekend and thanks again for your patience - I hope my blogs are making it at least bearable (and dare I say it, educational) :)