Your Pledges At Work

Plenty work on occlusion, level design, those annoying little tweaks and of course my task of the day which turned out to be tree collision. At one end of the day I was fixing an issue with a level running out of memory when the Test Level button was pressed, but it turned out to be VERY hungry trees. My first fix to remove the overzealous visibility geometry for the AI on trees brought memory usage on the test level I was using from 1.5GB to 750MB. Not bad right?  Well my second stint at improving the tree collision and AI obstacles for them improved performance and memory use further, plus sped up the Test Level process step. Not bad for 9 hours graft.

My title however does not refer to this blood'n'sweat routine which you guys get for free on a daily basis, it is in reference to some new artwork that has come in for one of our future updates and I really had to share:

I will keep the reasons a bit dark to preserve some suspense here but we have decided to turn our soldier guy into a few rotting Zombies, complete with scripts.  As you can see, they would also work as stealth ninja soldiers, ghost operatives soaked in someone else's blood or anything from the spirit realm. More on what WE plan to do with them in future blogs ;)

My plan for Wednesday is to start (and finish) my VERY LOW shader slider technique and grab some more FPS from the ether.  I also have my live interview with Intel at 8PM BST as well so do check that out if you can. Live questions are possible too, so you're chance to corner me with a cruel question if you like.  For now, day light is running out and I've not eaten, walked, or looked away from this damn monitor for 9 hours solid so I think I will try to cap off my work now and do something completely different...