Another update on our a0.7 build. This time, I’ll mainly talk about the grass. There was a lack of grass in a0.6, and really, all the alpha builds so far. The main reason for that is of course, efficiency, or the lack of. The grass in a0.6 took up way too many drawcalls, so we had to cut back on the numbers so that the framerate can be manageable. Fast forward to now, we’ve been working on a grass system of our own that’s separate from how the Unity engine does it. Now, we can get up to 15000 grass panels of up to 64 types of grass for 1 drawcall. What you get is this (grass not final):
Now, we’re also adding in wind direction and grass reaction to people (and maybe ai). Another thing regarding flora efficiency is that we’re cutting down on the types of flora that can be collected, this way, we can keep the types of flora (not counting grass/bush types) under 21 types within a 256X256m area, that will also help the ms (ms is milliseconds, which is how long it takes the cpu or gpu to process something, the less the better) greatly.
We’ve been trying to free up some milliseconds for a good reason, which is we’re trying to pull off real time cubemapping and ambient lighting based off of that (which will take 3-5ms). This mostly came about because we need a better way to detect caves and compensate the lighting accordingly. With a real time cubemap, we can do exactly that, since we can detect if the entire area is dark or not. Tests for this so far have been promesing, but we shall see once we put this in game.
Next time, I’ll show off our new planting system and the mineral detector.
i have a question, wouldnt this produce lag?
Not when it’s only using a few drawcalls. That was the point of the post, low lag grass. 🙂
when will we see the update?
Late November.
I picked this up yesterday and have been playing non stop. Way to go guys and this only the alpha! I was going to to suggest some sort of mineral scanner or something but it looks like you have that in the works. Keep it up!
guys… I just found interesting information… I found Data base with all formulas…. it would be like a good assistant to make game engine… did you heard something about WolframAlpha? there is …”I think that all science formulas”
feel in love with this game as soon as i seen it and played it till i couldnt go any farther and have to say it a great game cant wait for the next release
can’t use activation key do to down sever. any idea when it will be back up.
Fixed.
is the Multiplayer Advanture mode going to be fixed.
if we start it now we will get all the items.
its not realy fun to play like that plz fix it
so we can play multiplayer like it how it need to be!
p.s i realy love this game Gread work.
I wouldn’t call it fix, since it’s like that because it’s incomplete. But yes, multiplayer adventure will be more survivalistic.