Tuesday Got IMPOSTERS!!

And Phew!

At long last, today I saw my first peek at the working technology of true imposters within my static batching and occlusion system.

Impressive I know!  So what are you looking at?  Well the blue square is the background color of the camera and nothing to get excited about. The red square is our quad imposter which has been calculated automatically based on the position of the camera and the target object. The building in the center is the target object and it is being rendered via the imposter pixel for pixel exactly where the real model would have been rendered. Instead of hundreds of polygons, there are now just two.

Shadows About To Get Fast

The reason I show you a view from above is that this is the perspective the shadow light sees objects from. By using imposters when rendering the shadow objects, we will vastly accelerate the entire shadow drawing cycle too. Not forgetting the reflection views and light ray cameras!

Signing Off

I still have to do some finishing off and house-keeping, and of course add multiple target objects per communal texture, and then get it integrated into the main engine, but the crazy math part has been done, which is a big relief for me.  The immediate goal for Wednesday is to stop the popping effect currently vexing the Reloaded community, but the side effect of solving that should be some additional performance improvements.  That, together with the shader panel, might be enough performance to allow us to shift the percentage over to some non PPP work, such as player damage, enemy strengths and some improving tweaks.