Great Meeting And Good Work

Work

Had a good meeting on Tuesday (got patted on the back twice, so as you can imagine I was instantly suspicious). The cause for celebration was the fact I have been hammering performance so much it now runs at 60 fps on an integrated graphics chip. Sure, it's a snazzy Intel HD 5000 chip, but it's still a far cry from a dedicated watt gobbling monster most gaming rigs are rammed with. It is the LOWEST shader levels, and I have some visual tweaks to make, but it's a great improvement over previous versions.

I also had a power cut today, all be it my fault as I invited an electrician to look at my antiquated consumer unit and his little box of tricks tripped the whole house.  I was half way through an email too.  The great news is that my PC, Monitor and main Hubs all remained powered, and the UPS device only showed about 25% drain after what must have been 30 minutes. Pretty good! My email was safe!

Today I have done a few things, listed out of context but of some interest. Sped up the reflection render by removing grass from all but the highest setting, stopped start marker texture from disappearing, save level no longer crashes under new DXT5 compression mode, modified simplest water shader technique to use a bluer blue, fixed the jutter and freeze when on water so the player can glide along it smoothly (water antics to follow after performance solved) and some smaller tweaks.

It's just gone midnight and I am tackling the water edge boundaries for AI characters so they can miss the waters edge altogether.  Also investigating using the same technique to block off high hills so enemies cannot traverse over vertical cliffs to reach you.  I am conscious however that I want an early-ish night to get up on Thursday in the AM for some parallel development work on some items for GDC so it's a tricky one.  I will plod on some more and see where it takes me.