The asteroid technology has been completely overhauled thanks a brand new planetary terrain technology.
This terrain tech will be extended to Space Habitat and planets in upcoming updates.
It is a massive update as so many tech behind the scene has to be implemented or improved to deal with the amount of asteroids drawn.
Beside the new features the new terrain/asteroids use a different approach: it is way more generic and also leverage fully on other tech instead of being completely bespoke.
It was quite tricky to pull off as it stresses and push to the limit so many area of the game technology which had to be improved.
In the end it is a great thing as this will benefit other sections of the game beside terrain!
=> Please note that the system size has been reduced, so any player entities will unfortunately have to be repositioned if necessary.
New Terrain Technology:
- Feature LOD: as you move closer finer detailed terrain patches will fade-in.
- Terrain deformation: You can deform the terrain with weapons (for now, a proper mining feature will be introduced later)
- Fully integrated with the existing brick entity rendering technology, which means GPU culling and minimum CPU impact.
- Fully integrated with the existing physics technology, can be multi-thread for minimum CPU impact.
- Texture and terrain shape are very much wip and will be improved in a later update.
- Still a bit laggy if you zoom in fast onto terrain. It was already heavily optimized but still needs more work.
Asteroid Technology:
- Asteroids are now visible from much further away, the transition between sprite and actual geometry being much smoother and believable.
- Flying close the asteroid impact FPS much less compared to before (computations are multi-threaded)
- A few much larger asteroid are being spawned (several km wide)
- Generic asteroids (the smaller one, which are from a set of precomputed) also have a two levels LOD (on top of the builtin terrain LODs)
- Current asteroid are gray rock but will be more varied in the future, and the icy ones will also come back.
Other Improvements:
- Culling data was optimized, resulting in less memory allocated on the GPU (saving 100mb ++) and less hiccup
- Culling data transfer to GPU improved, resulting in less hiccup during ship loading or warping.
- Transform data transfer to GPU was optimized, with expensive TRS matrix computations done on a Compute Shader, which reduce CPU load
- World physics query was also improved, which reduce CPU load when many entity are scattered through the world.
- Particle Data CPU cost improved.
Next up, proper mining!