Arcen Games

General Category => AI War II => : x4000 September 15, 2016, 07:31:52 PM

: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: x4000 September 15, 2016, 07:31:52 PM
Hey folks,

So I'm still away from the design doc, and will be tomorrow, too.  I've been a bit under the weather, Keith has had some personal life stuff, Blue has been not so hot as well... fun times.

Overall my own slowness has mostly come from a desire to really nail things with the ships and battlefield look right from the start.  I've been focused on the planet and nebula backgrounds first, and looking at a form of lines to denote the plane the ships are on without being too distracting, and figuring out how I can do all of this with minimal GPU usage despite having a lot of variance possible.

Oh, and the camera for moving around in this, too.  I'd originally planned on just static views in the tech demo, but that wouldn't really give the right approach.

Oh, and I've been working on various things for recoloring and looking at different approaches with shaders (some from the asset store, some of my own that I'm creating fresh) and so forth to see what is most efficient.  Been learning about HDR in Forward rendering mode, too, which is new to me -- I was going to avoid HDR, but things just look so blah without it.  But there are some MSAA issues with HDR in Forward rendering apparently, although I'm not sure if those still apply if you're using tonemapping; information on that is surprisingly hard to find.

I could always go full deferred shading, but then we're entirely software-side for AA, and I'm not thrilled about that.  I'm not going to be making use of the awesome lighting characteristics of deferred shading, so that seems like wasted overhead in general.

Anyway, I really love this sort of work, and it's going smashingly, but I'm in general trying to condense what would usually be multiple weeks of work into a couple of days, and it's taking me slightly longer than I thought it might.

Oh, one of the other big slowdowns was simply examining toolsets for things like the uv mapping work.  I was hoping to save Blue and myself time in the long term with that, but I'm not sure that will be possible with the current types of tools.

Also been looking at things for setting up in-game cinematics, which I'll also be using for the kickstarter trailer.  Oh, and stuff for rendering out short gif clips, since that's a big deal for kickstarters, too.

I guess in some ways I'm actually not behind, heh.  I had just planned on working on ship shading and figured I could do that in two days or so.  Instead I've been working on all of the above, and have answers to a lot of it already figured out, or fairly advanced.  All of those things kind of intersect one another to some degree, so I've been working on them kind of in rotation and they should all come together about the same time into something coherent.

Anyhow, I should have some things to show tomorrow. :)
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Tridus September 15, 2016, 10:25:06 PM
Now I know how other people feel when I start talking about what the Oracle query optimizer is doing. ;)
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Misery September 16, 2016, 12:52:07 AM
Well, I didn't understand a word of that, nope.

Still, looking forward to whatever you have ready to show.
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Mánagarmr September 16, 2016, 03:04:11 AM
Well, I didn't understand a word of that, nope.

Still, looking forward to whatever you have ready to show.
Hear hear.
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Aklyon September 16, 2016, 09:42:51 AM
I think I might understand a little of that. But only in a 'Chris is trying to make things look nice using Science Unity', not actually what he's doing.
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: x4000 September 16, 2016, 09:46:13 AM
Cheers. ;)
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Draco18s September 16, 2016, 11:01:11 AM
Funny, I understood those words in that order...
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Yavaun September 16, 2016, 12:19:49 PM
I didn't understand a word. Perhaps it's because the closest I have ever come to working with a GPU is openMP 4.0 with artificial thread hierarchy. Or perhaps it's just that I don't know shit in general :D

Anyway, you keep doing what you do. I can wait.
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: x4000 September 16, 2016, 12:22:58 PM
openMP 4.0 with artificial thread hierarchy.

I did not understand those words, so we're even? ;)
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: Yavaun September 16, 2016, 12:28:24 PM
openMP 4.0 with artificial thread hierarchy.

I did not understand those words, so we're even? ;)

Maybe I just said 'em wrong  ;)
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: PokerChen September 16, 2016, 12:42:25 PM
I run into analogous problems from time to time making publication quality renders, but as a function of how both free and academic-free software generally does not provide universal support for everything. One would carefully set everything they wanted, and then discover that the plugin translating all of your 'stuff to render and how to tender it' into a language that the rendering programming understands,  doesn't know how to translate feature X.

Anyway, definitely go for HDR.  Once humans realised that computers can actually imitate the dynamic contrast offered by human sight, there was never any going back.

closest I have ever come to working with a GPU is openMP 4.0 with artificial thread hierarchy
Hang on, are you saying that OpenMP 4.0 covers GPU computing, are just that you're doing parallel computing? *Checks Google*
: Re: Current stuff going a bit slower than desired, but coming along well.
: x4000 September 16, 2016, 12:50:29 PM
Yeah, I've been in love with HDR for some time now.  But I thought "well, in the interest of GPU budget, why not just avoid it just this once..."

Nope nope nope.