Devblog 6th June 2017

[Blakpik]

I straight up do not understand what is going on here, but people seem to be really amazed, so I'm happy.

 

[Jananton]

Well, there is a point in any LOD system where there's a break even moment between faster drawing time and longer calculating, read CPU performance, time. The goal obviously is to find the right balance between the two and, not to forget, to find the right distance from the viewer where the change, or changes, depending on the number of LOD phases, takes place.

I can imagine that last one can be tricky in StarMade because of the sizes of some builds. It'll be interesting to see how that works out when implemented.

Greets,

Jan

 

[Blodge]

How about single large entities like 2km+ ships.. if, say, i stand on one end of such an entity, will the opposite end also be affected by this system?

Excellent question. I imagine the answer would be "yes"..?

 

[Lone_Puppy]

Awesome update schema!

 

[MacThule]

This gives me happy feelings...

 

[Edymnion]

Yay, I'm first

Wow, who knew that adding a new Chamber and Reactor system could get into LOD stuff.

This is what most people don't seem to realize when they say things like "Well just fix X, its a little thing!".

No, we the players don't KNOW that X is a little self contained piece or not. What looks simple and discreet to us could have a million dependencies on the back end to the point the slightest tweak in X could throw a ton of other things out of balance.

You never know what oddball things any given system actually affects, or how it interacts with other seemingly unrelated systems.

 

[Comradecolonel]

I'm really glad to see these types of blogs on the regular now. I think its great to see what you are working on week to week. I don't mind waiting for update if I have an idea of what being worked on behind the curtain. Much appreciated schema and I look forward to many more of these.

 

[Ankron]

So... much... excitement... I feel like I am being teased lol.

 

[Gmodism]

Today is June 6.

post was originally titled june 4

Exatly! Nationalday of Sweden, a happy day for all swedes ^^

 

[Drakkart]

Ok so we are reducing ploygons for faster drawing routines, nice! this means there is effort put into the game to keep big ships alive ; )
Good Work schema
I just hope the calculations necessary don't slow down the game too much. I mean there will be a bunch of shooting in the final game...
at rapid fire rates from multiple sources there might be lots of surface and depth changes to the block structure of an entity that is fired upon. So the recalculations for proper display might have to happen multiple times a second...
So yes i am concernded more such "improovements" might make the engine fall back behind the actual rendering of things. On the other hand i really do not have recent experience with javas execution speed... so you did some performance checks before hand and could you tell us how the system performs on a specific machine? - is there like a minimum system requirement for starmade to be?
I'd really appreciate if you could leave a word or two on the - percentual rendering speed increases of these mechanics.

 

[CoolDev2]

Wait... schema You didn't do this before? I'm not sure whether I should be impressed or disappointed.. On one hand I'm slightly impressed it ran as well as it did without that... On the other, the mesh simplification on a cubic block engine like this is incredibly simple to do and is a pretty easy boost to vertex processing and vertex memory... Why hadn't you done this previously? It does explain why giant ships had crap rendering performance even if they had what should be a low number of visible faces...