Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
With procedural items becoming more common, it was time to update our relevant systems. The first step was a new material system that can do better materials without impacting performance and adding to resource usage. We also need a better way to manage the huge number of unique materials and dynamically rendered textures.
The new system is much more tightly integrated with the core engine, it supports seamless streaming and multiple caching strategies to improve performance and reduce memory usage. It's all very efficient, scalable and future proof.
A quite difficult ongoing process is that of developing good realistic materials that can vary dramatically in quality and condition. Basically imagine a brand new sword timelapse aging into something old and badly rusted. Some of our tests so far have looked very impressive.
Once complete these updates will also affect characters and all armour and other apparel, which are already procedurally textured. This will improve visual quality, general performance and loading times.
Madoc had another go at reducing graphics driver CPU bottlenecks, but with a completely different approach and this time it seemed to work. The prototyped optimisation showed improvements to supersampling enabled performance of up to 40%.
We also discussed some ideas and details, both technical and gameplay-wise for upcoming arena content. There's a lot that we want to add, but we're not 100% ready to disclose what we have planned. That said, a lot of thought has been put into new arena maps, and new gameplay features.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
With procedural items becoming more common, it was time to update our relevant systems. The first step was a new material system that can do better materials without impacting performance and adding to resource usage. We also need a better way to manage the huge number of unique materials and dynamically rendered textures.
The new system is much more tightly integrated with the core engine, it supports seamless streaming and multiple caching strategies to improve performance and reduce memory usage. It's all very efficient, scalable and future proof.
A quite difficult ongoing process is that of developing good realistic materials that can vary dramatically in quality and condition. Basically imagine a brand new sword timelapse aging into something old and badly rusted. Some of our tests so far have looked very impressive.
Once complete these updates will also affect characters and all armour and other apparel, which are already procedurally textured. This will improve visual quality, general performance and loading times.
Madoc had another go at reducing graphics driver CPU bottlenecks, but with a completely different approach and this time it seemed to work. The prototyped optimisation showed improvements to supersampling enabled performance of up to 40%.
We also discussed some ideas and details, both technical and gameplay-wise for upcoming arena content. There's a lot that we want to add, but we're not 100% ready to disclose what we have planned. That said, a lot of thought has been put into new arena maps, and new gameplay features.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
