Today I started tackling one of the big optimizations: multithreaded area generation and management… Multithreaded code is always hard, since it demands a lot of care on how to build stuff, and since graphic APIs don’t like working multithreaded (at least D3D9 doesn’t), I need to work around that limitation as well… So started with […]
Today was mostly a bug-hunting day, but I had time to do other stuff… First things first, I removed one of the big bugs in the game: a raycast issue that would sometimes cause the game to freeze… This was very hard to detect, but after I found a way to replicate it consistently, it […]
Today I spent my evening trying to optimize the map generation (when the player lands on a planet) and the area generation (when the player changes areas). The map generation takes about 15 seconds on a normal map (this can be a bit more or less, but this is a good average), which is very […]
Today I worked on some bug fixing and optimization, namely on the voxel raycasting… I already suspected that my raycasting function was a bit iffy and missed some intersections, but today I got to confirm that and to fix it, while optimizing it a lot… So yesterday, while in debug mode, the game would drop […]
Today I integrated GLSL Optimizer to my shader code… It had some quirks: Doesn’t accept #line directives with name of the files, so I have to strip that when feeding it Doesn’t accept OpenGL 3.30 shaders This last one isn’t that bad, although I was using 3.30 shaders (the tutorials I was using were […]
Let me tell you a story… As I said yesterday, I felt a real drop in performance with the pirate lair, and I couldn’t figure out what was the issue. The normal course of action (if you don’t have a decent profiler or are too lazy to find a free one) is to shut down […]
In my test arena, I had some performance issues in same places, where about 9 lights were shinning in a greater or smaller degree… Considering that in a deferred renderer, the main issue is bandwidth (each shaded pixel needs at least 64 bytes of data to come in from texture memory – the G-Buffer), I […]
This weekend I worked on a major optimization; I was supposed to work on this after the first milestone was done, but I had serious enough performance issues to warrant the work now instead… The problem is related to the amount of objects. Most objects in Spellbook are composed of loads of triangles, but in […]