Hey Astro Colonists!
It's time for massive performance update!
I decided to finally finish work that I started 3 years ago.
Why did it take me so long?
I was afraid that not everything would work or look as it should. The change required modifying the way rendering works. Every single object is now rendered with a position offset.
Many necessary engine changes were required in order to have it work.
Some of the text below is technical, but I hope you will like it:
SHADER MOVEMENT PROTOTYPE 2021
I've been thinking about this technique even before the game's release.
As you can see, early prototypes with cameras and some objects were very promising!
Early tests allowed me to evaluate the technique and find out about visual glitches.
RENDERING ALL OBJECTS WITH OFFSET
Tricky task when the game is using more than 300 different materials.
This required changing many of them and adding a shader offset.
STATION ACTORS
Every interactive station actor had to be accessed and modified when station is moving.
In addition, all interactions with cameras had to be updated, where the camera offset also changed.
VIEW BOUNDARIES
The game engine is constructed to reduce the rendered objects on the screen as much as possible.
If objects are outside the camera's view, they won't be rendered.
Without increasing the boundaries of the object based on velocity this wouldn't be possible.
MATERIAL WORLD POSITION OFFSET
Many materials, based on position, can randomize its look.
Turns out that many position based materials like shaking trees, wheat, water, ground or voxel terrain, started to scroll and had to be adjusted accordingly.
EDGE CASES
Many in-game actors required special care due to their unique roles in the game.
Almost every system with interactions had to be adjusted to the new modified positions of objects and shifted cameras. Here are just some improved elements:
- rover with its complex suspension system
- spacecraft with thrusters and calculations for thrust
- bot with its animated mesh, camera, projection cone particles and text
- all other characters visible in multiplayer
- every interactive system like asteroid catchers with new "catch"
- sky and nebulas
SUMMARY
Thanks to reducing the physical location updates of all stations from 60 to just one a second, it greatly improves performance. As you can see in the example, the gain is enormous.
Moving station before couldn't keep 10 fps, right now it's running at 80 fps.
RENDERING OPTIMIZATION
In addition to many CPU improvements, some GPU improvements were made.
A new culling system for objects is in place, which disables updates and makes them invisible when they are far away. In addition, voxels are using LODs, so far-away planets are not affecting GPU.
Please be patient and let me know about every issue encountered.
I believe this is actually the biggest and the most technical update, so it's impossible to avoid some bugs. I hope to fix all of them this week. The most urgent issues will be fixed in the hotfix tomorrow.
Thanks guys so much for support!
Tefel (Terad Games)