Houston, We Have Triplanar

After a three day bank holiday break, I returned to a huge inbox of questions, action points, feedback and comments from all across the Reloaded spectrum. Took a while, but whittled them down to five, and one of those was a useful email from Rick showing a great tutorial on Triplanar terrain texturing. So well described was the technique, that it formed quite quickly in my head and I was able to see how it could be grafted to the current terrain shader.

As you can see, the rock texture is not stretched now and uses it's own XY and YZ texture UV look-ups to create a perfect vertical mapping. It cost me a little performance (from 205fps down to 187fps) but will measure less than 1-2 fps when down in the 60 fps range.  For this trade-up in visual quality, I plan some more aggressive performance work to get that back with interest.

We also had a team meeting just before the holiday break and it was agreed that performance be given the highest of priorities where-ever possible.  To this end I will be working on shadow baking and render reduction so that we can get high frame rates on the lowest of hardware (integrated graphics).

The good news is that I have already made a good start on this process, and I will be getting some extra modern day assets this week which will allow me to show off what this new pre-bake step can do in terms of visual improvement and overall performance increase. I was using a new Ultrabook this weekend and was able to run around a small scene with characters chasing me and weapons free action at 70-90 fps, so we are not too far away from where we need to be.  Watch this space for some new 'pre-baked lighting' screen shots which should be worth a thousand words :)