Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Tag Archives: optimization

Bit of an hiatus…

Sorry about it, guys, but I’ve been really busy with real life stuff, and really incapable of making time to develop the game… Doesn’t help motivation is a tad low at the moment… Anyway, here’s hoping this week I’ll get back to normal! So, one of the complaints I had from the Game Dev Camp […]

This was complicated…

What seemed like a simple issue to solve (lack of performance on low-end card because of ambient occlusion) ended up being much more complicated than expected! So, yesterday I decided to add a new system to be able to customize the level of ambient occlusion (in terms of resolution)… I added the system, but while […]

Issues with performance

Today I was trying to test the game in fullscreen under Linux and I found a weird performance issue… In the initial cutscene, the game was running very slow (about 30 FPS), but when I moved the player to the left a bit (so more geometry on screen), the game jumped to the normal 60 […]

Frustrating optimizations

Today I added one optimization that was on the list for ages now: camera culling… Before you start shouting at me, there was already some camera culling being performed, mainly on the voxels (which is the biggest hit on the rendering), and I don’t believe in premature optimization… Anyway, since this was on the list, […]

Raycasting optimization

Yesterday, while playing around with the beam cannon, I found some bugs on the collision detection, so today I dived right into that… The current method for raycasting on the voxel map is to do sampling: start at the beginning of the ray and walk through it, checking if it is a solid cell. Of […]

60 FPS!

Tadam! Found the issue with the frame rate… The game is running at a good framerate, but due to some old code, the frame rate got locked to 50 FPS, which in a normal monitor that refreshes at 60 Hz causes some jumps in the image… “So, Covenant, you just had to change a variable […]

Optimization

I wasn’t happy with the performance of the game in certain points, with drops to 30 or 40 FPS, as measured by Fraps… So, I decided to dust off my profiling tools and try to figure out where were the bottlenecks, but when I was running the initial benchmarks I got a very strange issue: […]

Optimization: Shader Cache

The shader system on “Cantrip” has some sophistication to it, and part of it is the fact that it generates the specific necessary shaders from a uber-shader (a big shader full of conditions) and a render environment that trims that uber-shader to smaller ones, depending on need… The problem with this approach is that everytime […]

More multithreading

And another day without a screenshot… Mostly work behind the scenes, but it’s going along nicely… Already can generate areas in the background and they work fine… It’s a lot of work, but most of it has been smooth sailing (which is a bit unexpected)… Need to deal with some crashes (to be expected) and […]