A Good But Long Day

By working on the new Concrete Jungle level, I have had to fortune to see what larger levels need to deal with in terms of system memory requirements and overall game speed. Considering where my aging PC system was six months ago, being able to run the level shown below at over 60 fps was nice to see.

As you can see, the lightmapping now extends to all the geometry, and the nice fog intensity provides a good atmospheric effect for what might be a sand swept landscape.  I am happy to imagine the performance gains once I finalize the occluder optimizations, re-introduce the distant quad system and wrangle more magic from the draw order scenario.  For right now my mission is stability which means chasing down any hard crashes.

The one I am tackling right now is the 3.3GB the terrain lightmapper alone can consume, but I am happy to report other gremlins have been fixed including the z flicker and the dreaded real-time vs pre-bake shadow disappearing act. Planning to continue working into the night now, and perhaps stop at midnight to make an internal build for the weekend.  Might also play an hour on Far Cry to conquer some more outposts for fun and profit.  It's likely I will spend some time over the weekend testing the build for stability analysis, but providing I can keep the system memory usage from going nuts, I think we will be good to go.