Hey folks,
In the next couple of days I'm going to put together a little multi-platform "game" (I use the term incredibly loosely) that will let you view a couple of static scenes with some stock art of specific complexities, and it will record the performance of drawing those scenes on your computer as well as some information about your computer. You can then look at the output log it created and send it to us, if you're comfortable (there's nothing private there).
There are a number of permutations of how Blue and I can do the art for this game, and I'm not sure which will have the best performance to visual ratio, while also being the most tune-able for different kinds of graphics cards.
Blue has been out with a power outage since last Thursday thanks to Hermine, but she's back now and working first on the logo, and then far zoom icons (things will be coming up for feedback on the latter tomorrow), and then we'll be moving in to actual ship art and so forth after that.
But before we get too invested in one approach, I want to see just how far we can push the exciting quality bar without making performance a dog. At present in the design document I wrote from the perspective of a minimum-possible-load perspective, but more recently I'm realizing that because of the nature of the game I probably have FAR more latitude than that.
This tester "game" won't actually have any game logic at all in it, nor any original art for this game. But it will do a great job giving me a profile of what is and is not acceptable, and what works the best on your machines, and thus determine the art style path as this moves forward. I have a sneaking suspicion that we can do more than what I'd originally been thinking...
I need folks on windows, linux, and osx, so if you want to be notified please reply to this thread with the "Notify me of replies." on, and I'll post here on probably Friday or Saturday when it is ready. Knock on wood those days...
