I generally like to post once in awhile. As the mood arises to do so.
I haven't done so in awhile.
That has mainly been due to becoming very actively engaged in basically two things in my "free" time lately.
1. I've been playing some Fallout 76 with my wife and family in the private world she has with her Fallout 1st subscription. It is something we enjoy doing together. We may switch to another game in the near future. We've talked of revisiting Valheim since we haven't played it for awhile and they've added a lot to it. We've talked about some Deep Rock Galactic since we haven't played that in a long time. We've talked about some No Man's Sky. We've talked about some Conan Exiles. Ark Survival Evolved, and numerous other co-ops with potential private dedicated servers may be considered as well. All the ones I listed so far I have played before. I do own a few I haven't tried out yet. All of which are possibilities. At the moment we are enjoying Fallout 76 since it is private and we are not having to deal with PvPers and can just enjoy it together.
2. I've been actively working on my game development projects and focusing on one for now with the hope of actually releasing something in the future. My son has also been hard at work on one as well.
I am sure I will post more here in the future. Sometimes I need to in order to silence the nagging in my mind.
Until then... that is why I am silent.
Because it seems I should always have an image with a post...
EDIT: I decided to add a few notes for other developers. The above scenes are procedurally generated space maps. As such they are not hand crafted so cannot benefit from baking lightmaps.
This has lead to some interesting things. Those suns have a point light on each. The planets, hexes, ships, etc. are using a ColorGrid technique I created and wrote about here before. Those planets, ships, hexes, etc. all collectively only take one draw call (set pass) to render. It was surprising when I saw a really large number of draw calls happening compared to what I was expecting. It turns out that is purely due to those point lights. I added an option to toggle those off/on and I'm going to give you a few screenshots here. A large map... with lights on, then the same map with the lights off. For those of you developing knowing how lights can impact the scene can be important. You can also switch from forward to deferred rendering to help with this some. It didn't make a huge difference in my case so I stuck with forward as I prefer it's results when I can get away with using them.
Turning off those lights dropped the SetPass calls from 855 down to 120. That is pretty significant and changed the FPS from 112FPs to 158FPS in this shot. I saw it go as high as 177FPS. These shots are me running it in a quadrant of my monitor in editor mode running at 1920x1080. When I run it maximized in 4K resolution with the lights on I get around 77FPS and with them off I'll sometimes hit 150FPS. I don't have my AI and such running crazy all over the map yet so I am trying to leave as much room for that as possible. I did do some stress tests early on with several hundred ships cruising all over the place on the map and it remained close to the same.
As to the ColorGrid. That is the technique where anything I converted to ColorGrid uses the same material. I can have many different 3d objects made by different people but all using a single material without me needing to create texture atlases of all of their textures. It does change things but it is a style that works in some cool cases. Since the trade sequence on the station will be using Synty Studios POLYGON series assets this style fits fine with that.
Here is some zoom ins on some hexes so you can see what I mean by color grid. You can't tell when zoomed out that this is what I've done. :)
This is the texture that all the planets, ships, and hexes share.
