Slowed to a crawl…

This weekend was spent mostly with family, so not much progress was done on Grey, besides fixing one million small bugs and nuisances in the editor, per artist suggestion… It will take me forever to get used to the new key/mouse bindings!

Anyway, had some tricky problems in the editor that were only apparent when we tried using the editor in real circumstances, namely the building of the arena.

The arena has a 40×40 tile area (which means about 80×80 meters)… Since in the editor the objects have to be individualized (so they can be worked on), this means that the ground alone is made up of 1600 objects, which stressed some of the less efficient systems in the editor, making it almost unusable.

One such systems was the rectangle selection system, which grabs the object’s bounding box (recomputed every time it is requested), transforms it to screen coordinates and matches it with the given rectangle… For 100 objects, this is ok, but for 1600 it was really slowing down the system! It’s fixed now, but it was hard tracking the exact problem (since I can’t find a decent free profiler that works on my editor)… Initially I was panicking thinking the renderer was dying with just 1600 objects.

Anyway, the editor is a bit more stable, a lot more useful and work continues to progress in the building of the great arena…

Just the ground, for your viewing pleasure:

I know it looks very “8-bit”, but that’s because ambient intensity is cranked up to maximum, there’s no directional lights (so no normal map details), and we’re too far away (so the chaos in the textures just makes that 8-bit look). Hopefully in the next days we’ll have the time to fill it up with some more assets, and I figure that after we add the real lights (and shadows) and the color-grading, it will look great!