Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
In the past weeks we've mentioned how we've been trying to tackle various graphics driver performance and quality issues. The quality issues are particularly stubborn, and it seems they can only be fixed by making major changes to our shading pipeline.
Madoc got tired of trying to work around these problems and decided to buckle down and overhaul our shading system. This is complicated because we rely on our rendering being scalable and flexible (runs well on low-end systems, can do a lot of different stuff). To do this we can't just write some shading code, we generate hundreds of very specialised shaders for every situation.
To overhaul the shading system and continue work on all the rendering updates efficiently, Madoc developed a sort of meta shading language that allows us to do all this much more easily. This is all done with an in-engine code editor, so we have instant results and a really nice workflow.
The system itself is up and running, and we've already made good progress on all the new shading. The interactive workflow allowed us to easily fine tune various things, so we've already got some really nice quality upgrades from that alone. We're confident we can fix all the issues we're having, and hopeful that we can get some nice performance improvements.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
In the past weeks we've mentioned how we've been trying to tackle various graphics driver performance and quality issues. The quality issues are particularly stubborn, and it seems they can only be fixed by making major changes to our shading pipeline.
Madoc got tired of trying to work around these problems and decided to buckle down and overhaul our shading system. This is complicated because we rely on our rendering being scalable and flexible (runs well on low-end systems, can do a lot of different stuff). To do this we can't just write some shading code, we generate hundreds of very specialised shaders for every situation.
To overhaul the shading system and continue work on all the rendering updates efficiently, Madoc developed a sort of meta shading language that allows us to do all this much more easily. This is all done with an in-engine code editor, so we have instant results and a really nice workflow.
The system itself is up and running, and we've already made good progress on all the new shading. The interactive workflow allowed us to easily fine tune various things, so we've already got some really nice quality upgrades from that alone. We're confident we can fix all the issues we're having, and hopeful that we can get some nice performance improvements.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
