Final Week Day On Performance

Well I've had a week, and I've crushed some bottlenecks and got my demo from 35 fps up past 60 fps which was my goal.  Today is about putting everything back together now so the software has no wires hanging out before the weekend. That means adding a PRE-BAKE vs REALTIME slider panel drop-down so we can choose between the old way and the new way.  Making sure the editor and test game can work as it did before, and also that I can lightmap any time I want when I press F1, that the levels save the lightmapping work and reload it perfectly every time, that it can handle The Escape demo without crashing (all be it on a single thread which causes test game to freeze while the lightmapping is in progress), plus fix an issue that has just emerged in the IDE which is now slowly than it used to be, so that needs investigating.

Also been experimenting with quality settings, with the above showing a quality setting of 2.0 and the one below showing the setting at 0.5.

The effects are so subtle I decided to change the default lightmapper to 1.0 for the moment and come back to the degree of effect the quality value provides.

I have also added a new PRE-BAKE vs REALTIME slider panel drop down box which lets me bounce from these two modes, and I invite you to guess which one is which between the one above and the one below.

Perhaps a little unfair as I still need to line up the intensities of the scene, but I am planning something very specific in this respect mid-October.  Still plenty of performance work I 'COULD' do to the engine, but my week is up and I will be making a case at the next strategy meeting to do some MORE performance work, especially on the GPU side using the GPA Frame Analyser, and perhaps a little NSIGHT as well.  My task list still shows render ordering and object occlusion work as priority items, but it looks like I have run out of time this week. I still have two more days next week before the meeting so more progress on performance still to come.  Pretty happy with this weeks work however, from all the team, and quite buzzed to repeat this next week too!  

Until then, enjoy your weekend and if the sun is shining, try to pry yourself away from the keyboard and go for a nice walk.  At least that's my advice to me, whether I take it or not is another matter.