C64 Tunes Heaven

Discovered my liking for old C64 SID music again, and been playing them in loops on YouTube :)  Very retro and food for my 8-bit brain!  Today has been a mixed bag of work which included some email sorting but mainly focusing on reducing the overhead from the shadow system. As you know my pre-bake is now assuming responsibility for all static shadows so that means I don't need the real-time shadow maker from doing quite so much work, so today has been about reducing that workload until the shadow slider is really just responsible for controlling the pre-bake shadow intensity.  Once I have reached that goal, I can add in the PREBAKE vs REALTIME slider panel drop-down and re-instate the real-time shadow system for those that want it.

A shot of my shadow test prototype without pre-bake

A shot of my shadow test prototype with pre-bake

The above is the level I am using to conduct my shadow testing, that is, one building on the landscape with some barrels and crates.  Nice and quick to load and easy to confirm the existence of shadows and check frame rate.

Here is another shot I took during the call at 4PM, and a suggestion of things to come with the new pre-bake step in the software.  Nice how the light catches the barrel and stretches into the tent.  Once we have interior static lights from lanterns, candles and perhaps a small fire, it should be awesome!

Have another 20 minutes or so to bash the shadow render from it's current 11% down to 1% (after all it's just one building on a simple render target).  I commented out the offending function highlighted by VTUNE and it went from 180fps to 220fps with no visual difference so I need to make a saving here before moving on.

You would think with the progress made my list is being demolished, but every day I have new ideas and thoughts about performance improvements, and add to the list. It's as long as it was when I started, but at least the engine is better for it and hopefully I can make up a day or two as I start to work on the original items such as static batching of lightmapped geometry and finding out why fonts are taking 64MB of video memory and 50MB of system memory :)