More text, some math…

Today I fixed some more of the text system, it looks much better than yesterday now, in terms of spacing (which makes the text easier to read):

Also fixed some bugs with z-fighting (still plenty to go around with a 24-bit buffer), and now the fade-outs go to real black (annoyed the hell out of me the way some bright stuff could still be seen!).

I played the game a bit, testing the cutscenes that are complete so far, and fine tuning some details…

The transition of the areas is bugging me more and more… It takes too long (3 or 4 seconds), and it’s visually jarring, especially because of the different resolution between the area the player is on and the vicinity (a 4 to 1 ratio).

I can’t have all the voxels on RAM all the time (it would consume about 3.5 Gb RAM just for the voxel data, and even more for the mesh data). I could just have the immediate vicinity in RAM, would take about 1.5Gb, but even that can cause an out of memory on a weaker machine… There’s a lot of other small tricks I could use, including going all the way to a progressive rendering system and a continuous world streamed from the HD, but that’s too much work for what was supposed to be a small game…

For now, I’ll settle for using just half the resolution (it already looks way better), but I think I’m going to add some sort of multi-threaded area generation so that the transition doesn’t take so long… This would work by starting to generate the new area (voxel representation, meshes, navigation grid) when I get close to it, on a separate thread so it doesn’t stall the game…

Now the main objective must be to make the game complete, then I have plenty of time for fine tuning, optimization, etc…

Now listening: “Tattooed Millionaire” by “Bruce Dickinson”

Link of the Day: This was the game that apparently stole E3… I think I already talked about it in the past, but the game is quite impressive and has some ideas I had already thought about putting into a game that I’m curious to see if they work in practice: No Man’s Sky