Just a quick note that yes, I’m still alive and kicking. Been a little distracted by various non-coding things, but have fixed up a few more rendering issues. Most notable new stuff is that we no longer waste time drawing terrain triangles which would have been drawn beneath the water (since the water surface is opaque), and some optimisations to my VBO implementation, which gives faster rendering overall (substantially faster, on my laptop).
I’ve also gotten a start on GUI stuff for MMORPG Tycoon 2, but that’s still in a very early state. Hopefully there’ll be new things which can be screenshotted and posted within a few days!
Apart from all that, I’ve also been enjoying Ghostbusters: The Video Game far more than it deserves by any objective game review criteria, been watching re-mastered episodes of classic Star Trek (which aren’t quite as cringe-worthy as I’d expected them to be), and listening to JUMPsplat.
So it’s been an extremely busy day today. Today I revamped a lot of VectorStorm’s underside, in order to support this magical feature that I’ve been wanting for a while; the ability to do the old style “bright vector glow” at the same time as rendering other geometry normally. Long-time readers will have noticed that all glow vanished from the MMORPG Tycoon shots a month or two back, as I simply wasn’t happy with the “brightness threshhold” mechanism I was using to determine which bits of the screen glowed and which didn’t. Now I have a system where I can mark any individual object as glowing or not, and it works (basically) as one would expect.
Notice, for example, in this screenshot that the red hook object is made up of stripes; half the stripes are brightly glowing white, and the other half are non-glowing red. Notice that the cursor outline glows, but the sky and clouds (which are both brighter than the cursor outline) are not glowing. This sort of trick is surprisingly tricky to do! But I’ve finally got it working, and at virtually no performance penalty. (In fact, in MMORPG Tycoon the glow will be cheaper than in previous games, as the lack of a flat black background means that I can get away with using a slightly cheaper Gaussian blur to generate the glow effect; the background noise helps hide the extra artifacting)
I’ve also fixed a more low-level performance bug which was causing VBOs to take about twice as long to render as they should have. Nice speed boost, and it means that I can use VBOs again, instead of using display lists for everything! Yay!
There’s an old maxim amongst programmers, that premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Or to put that in a less glib way, it’s generally a bad idea to perform optimisations before your program is completed, and it’s always a bad idea to perform optimisations if you have no way to check your performance before and after. In practice, this means that you need to use a profiler before you start thinking about performing optimisations.
So apologies, but it’s another technical post. For those who aren’t interested in programmer topics but are looking for pretty screenshots or discussions about game design, please feel free to skip this one. Coders, hit the ‘Continue Reading’, below. :)
Continue reading “On Optimisations”
It’s amazing what a few tiny water ripples will do for a scene.
Water effect heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Their water effects aren’t quite appropriate for this game, but their approach to handling water totally got me thinking in the right direction, so kudos to them! Also kudos to Alex May for suggesting I look at Wind Waker again for water inspiration.
Apart from this, I’ve managed very little development work today; been busy with a few other non-computery projects. Should be back onto MMORPG Tycoon later this weekend.
I have nothing to say, today. I just stumbled over this little setting, and had to take a screengrab.
