Fps improvement.

[serge1944]

Hello,
So I noticed some things that make fps drops that are realy obvious.(English is not my native language).

Critics:

First:I noticed that for some reason and no reason at all,blocks that we can not see are generated.
Second:No rendering from far away;you can see the same block type and texture as you see it from up close.
Third:Generating blocks that you see are not first in queue,its a whole groupe of blocks that are in the queue(example planets generating's starts from the middle by generating the underground cubes that don't matter because you are not supposed to see them instead of the cubes on the surface.

Improvement:

First:Make blocks that we can only see and blocks that are one cube behind only be generated(huge Fps performance will be gained by there)blocks that are two cubes behind the cubes that you see will not be generated(Idea from other games).
Second:Rendering going far away will make texture and blocks shape be less polished and less texture same for effects.
Third:Make planets generate the blocks on the surface first then only two blocks of deph the oder blocks will be awaiting an explosion or the player mining.

All of this can be use using triggers around the player,for the first one and third one use a trigger in a from of a cone following the players face and some triggers mesuring the player distances with the blocks.

 

[therimmer96]

First:Make blocks that we can only see and blocks that are one cube behind only be generated(huge Fps performance will be gained by there)blocks that are two cubes behind the cubes that you see will not be generated(Idea from other games).

The game uses face culling. This means that if a full block is covered from every side by full blocks, none of it will be rendered. Basically put, blocks you can't see cause minuscule FPS drops, and that's probably more from the having to keep track of them more than anything. You can see this in build mode, noclip into a stuffed section of a ship and you won't see textures from the individual blocks, only those that are externally visible. The game had occlusion culling at a chunk level, but I'm not sure if it still works as the option was greyed out.

Second:Rendering going far away will make texture and blocks shape be less polished and less texture same for effects.

Things like emmisive maps and normal maps and shaders like lighten mode already stop if you get to far from them. I doubt textures cause all that much lag anyway, as I have never noticed a difference between using 256 and 64 textures even on my crappy HD4000 laptop. LOD's for blocks at a block level would be completely pointless, you can't get less detail in a block than 6 polys, and I said earler, most of them are not being rendered anyway. LOD's would have to work at a chunk level, and there was a popular thread for this awhile back where lots of us talked about it, and there is a lot of work to get that to work right.

Third:Make planets generate the blocks on the surface first then only two blocks of deph the oder blocks will be awaiting an explosion or the player mining.

Again, the rendering of blocks use face culling. Chunk level LOD's could work on planets, but I think they would need to be bigger for them to be effective. Schema has apparently said in that interview he did on the homepage atm that he thinks he can cut FPS lag from planets down enough to double their size, so there are clearly plans already in place for this.

 

[Keptick]

I recall schema explaining that occlusion culling is really hard to get right. He managed to get it working properly fpr an update, but graphical optimizations in an other update caused occlusion culling to mess up. So with that in mind occlusion culling is probably a waste of time for schema at this point in development since small rendering changes can just break it.