Adam
Hey there!
This week, I had other business to take care of, but had very productive discussions with Daniel concerning species appearance customization and the project’s LOD (Level Of Detail, a graphical optimization strategy) approach.
We’ll probably dedicate a post to LODs in the near future so you can see everything that goes into having things that are both pretty and can run on our machines without melting them.
Daniel
Hello, this week I’ve been touching up on the faces a little bit and handing off a bunch of knowledge about them to Adam to aid him in integrating them fully into the systems that need them.
Aside from that I’ve been looking at a lot of ways of improving graphics performance. LOD’s (adaptive mesh density depending on the distance from camera), profiling (looking at where the computer is spending it’s time), and optimizing the substances (procedural texture generation graphs). This is one of those steps that you don’t want to do too early but this is definitely a good time for us to be looking into it.
For example for one substance it improved performance by an order of magnitude.
Also I’ve been doing a pass to update some assets that have had changes pending for a while, for example the starfield/nebulae in the skybox (the background in space) is now using HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.
Dave
Hi!
This week was kind of a a thinking week for me. I was doing some high-level mapping of sub-location room prefixes, the suffixes. traits, and plotpoints to ensure an even distribution and everything will end up linked together in such away that fulfills the high level goals of the system.