Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
This week we've mostly been focusing on getting the new rendering features game ready. This mostly concerns completing the new GI (Global Illumination) system. Some time ago we showed some screenshots of this in action, it was a prototype that proved it worked well, both visually and performance wise, but it was limited to small environments with limited light sources, which means there was still quite a lot of work to do.
Compared to this prototype our final implementation has to support large scenes and big view distances, it can cover a dynamic area 60 times larger than the crude GI solution that is currently in the game. It must handle virtually unlimited dynamic light sources, and complex emitters (this will be important for force thaumaturgy). It has to be completely dynamic and support massive streaming environments, precomputing for static scenes and massive file sizes is not an option to us.
Getting it to this stage involves a lot of work, which was postponed by all the work that had to go into the new renderer in general, and also the work on procedural weapons and materials. At this point though we should have the actual GI system up and running by next week. This was also an unplanned "addition", but what we have in game now is full of limitations and problems, the renderer was already getting redone, and when the idea for this came to us it was too good to ignore and made way too much sense to do it all together.
All of this has been an enormous undertaking, which broke what we hoped would be a streak of more frequent updates. We should be rolling updates out again quite soon, and we have been busy on lots of other fronts in the meantime, so there's quite a lot on the way. This work is also not just about improving graphics (which it certainly does), but about solving graphics driver issues, greatly improving our productivity, and paving the way for many features and content.
There's a lot we could talk about here, on the surface these are graphics features, but they are really big ones, with lots of practical implications too. We don't want to bore you with too many details, but if you have any questions or just want to discuss then just post here!
-the BM team
This week we've mostly been focusing on getting the new rendering features game ready. This mostly concerns completing the new GI (Global Illumination) system. Some time ago we showed some screenshots of this in action, it was a prototype that proved it worked well, both visually and performance wise, but it was limited to small environments with limited light sources, which means there was still quite a lot of work to do.
Compared to this prototype our final implementation has to support large scenes and big view distances, it can cover a dynamic area 60 times larger than the crude GI solution that is currently in the game. It must handle virtually unlimited dynamic light sources, and complex emitters (this will be important for force thaumaturgy). It has to be completely dynamic and support massive streaming environments, precomputing for static scenes and massive file sizes is not an option to us.
Getting it to this stage involves a lot of work, which was postponed by all the work that had to go into the new renderer in general, and also the work on procedural weapons and materials. At this point though we should have the actual GI system up and running by next week. This was also an unplanned "addition", but what we have in game now is full of limitations and problems, the renderer was already getting redone, and when the idea for this came to us it was too good to ignore and made way too much sense to do it all together.
All of this has been an enormous undertaking, which broke what we hoped would be a streak of more frequent updates. We should be rolling updates out again quite soon, and we have been busy on lots of other fronts in the meantime, so there's quite a lot on the way. This work is also not just about improving graphics (which it certainly does), but about solving graphics driver issues, greatly improving our productivity, and paving the way for many features and content.
There's a lot we could talk about here, on the surface these are graphics features, but they are really big ones, with lots of practical implications too. We don't want to bore you with too many details, but if you have any questions or just want to discuss then just post here!
-the BM team
