Monday Motoring On

Full Speed Ahead Mr Sulu

A full and productive day, with lots of little touches that make a big difference.  Two things I am sure will delight is the auto-foundation system for buildings which will level the terrain beneath buildings and remove the grass vegetation from inside the area.

Another cool one is the day/night cycle is in, using a technique similar to the visuals achieved in SkyRim which did day and night very well indeed.  Instead of calculating lots of sky assets, I simply fade between a day skybox and a night skybox based on hour of the day, which creeps along. Before you ask, all this will be configurable (and can be switched off).  

Not in yet is the further idea that when you go to night, EVERYTHING gets affected. Terrain loses color and light, shadows get softer, weapon loses it's daylight shine and the fog rolls in to reduce nighttime visibility. Put it all together and it should be a very effective transition, and another option for your game making antics.

Physics Perhaps?

I have some (well lots) of small editor/engine related tweaks to make the creative experience better and more fluid. I also want to get all the collision and physics reactions going as soon as possible, simply because it's going to be great fun watching barrels and boxes tumble about and have the player go around things instead of going through them.  We will see.

Signing Off

It's starting to look like a pretty cool editing experience now, and once the rest of the modules have been dragged into the main engine, we can start to see what kind of performance we'll get.  I have installed the GTX card over the weekend and installed the performance profiling tools too.  Looks like it will take more than a one click debug with the tools though, so probably a day somewhen this month will be put to CPU and GPU profiling.  One good thing is that in using the NVIDIA card, I solved a bug which did not show on AMD. Those kind of slight driver differences can be difficult to catch, so I am glad I found this one quickly before it scurried away.  More fun Tuesday!!