Zetheros
Developer
Hey Exanimates,
This week we ported our terrain and 3D grass over to the new rendering system, which means we are finally able to actually run the entire game on it. We've also added a compatibility mode for our legacy materials, so while many are not correct within our new renderer, they still kind of work and we can take our time with updating them rather than try to rush to update them all right away.
Our new GI system is based on something similar to voxels, and it relies on a full volume representation of scenes. Something we're doing for it is precomputing a volumetric data of many of our 3D models, this is fast and automatic, but before doing this we took some time to think about the applications of it. This is different from voxelisation, and the algorithm we develop can have quite an effect on the accuracy. The GI system itself is very tolerant and doesn't need accurate volumes, but there is potentially a lot more we can do with this data, so it makes sense to get it right.
One obvious application is the pathfinding system overhaul we'll be doing soon, this too will use a volumetric representation and will be much more 3D than the current system. This data is also ideal for fluid dynamic style applications, and we're thinking about ways in which we could use it to solve the force thaumaturgy scene collision / interaction problem, potentially simulating force effects similarly to fluids, and anyway providing some nice visual effects. There are many more ways in which we could leverage this data, it can be a really useful tool to solve many problems going forward.
Anyway, this week we have improved these things and we've actually got a new build of the game running on all the new systems. There's still some visual effects and optimisation layers to introduce, but we're almost there and we've already started updating many key assets to take better advantage of it all.
With all the rendering stuff coming to a close we're focusing more of our attention on the updates to arena, we're figuring out some last details and started work on some nice features. We've kept a lot of this under wraps for now, but we should be able to talk about it more soon so stay tuned.
Have an absolutely fabulous chonker of a week, peeps!
-the BM team
This week we ported our terrain and 3D grass over to the new rendering system, which means we are finally able to actually run the entire game on it. We've also added a compatibility mode for our legacy materials, so while many are not correct within our new renderer, they still kind of work and we can take our time with updating them rather than try to rush to update them all right away.
Our new GI system is based on something similar to voxels, and it relies on a full volume representation of scenes. Something we're doing for it is precomputing a volumetric data of many of our 3D models, this is fast and automatic, but before doing this we took some time to think about the applications of it. This is different from voxelisation, and the algorithm we develop can have quite an effect on the accuracy. The GI system itself is very tolerant and doesn't need accurate volumes, but there is potentially a lot more we can do with this data, so it makes sense to get it right.
One obvious application is the pathfinding system overhaul we'll be doing soon, this too will use a volumetric representation and will be much more 3D than the current system. This data is also ideal for fluid dynamic style applications, and we're thinking about ways in which we could use it to solve the force thaumaturgy scene collision / interaction problem, potentially simulating force effects similarly to fluids, and anyway providing some nice visual effects. There are many more ways in which we could leverage this data, it can be a really useful tool to solve many problems going forward.
Anyway, this week we have improved these things and we've actually got a new build of the game running on all the new systems. There's still some visual effects and optimisation layers to introduce, but we're almost there and we've already started updating many key assets to take better advantage of it all.
With all the rendering stuff coming to a close we're focusing more of our attention on the updates to arena, we're figuring out some last details and started work on some nice features. We've kept a lot of this under wraps for now, but we should be able to talk about it more soon so stay tuned.
Have an absolutely fabulous chonker of a week, peeps!
-the BM team
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