OK, a little bit latter as promised, here is the first video showing off engine features that are in a near final form:
First time doing any "real" video editing. Took me quite some time and hopefully my productivity and results will improve on future videos.
Since this video is late and I did not stop working meanwhile, I have enough new features for another two similar videos (but probably shorter) that I could record/post even right now. I still need to space out the content on the blog and YouTube, so today I am going the ignore the rest of the features and focus only on terrain.
So let me walk you quickly though the contents of the video. First I show the dynamic quality switching. It might be hard to tell, but every 1-2 seconds I change the quality of the terrain as I am moving around. I am fairly happy with the preset quality levels and any concerns are more stylistic than implementation related. The presets have predictable performance, with higher quality being slower, but unfortunately my terrain is bus capped so I can't get accurate GPU times on the rendering. A future version 2 of the terrain might use again vertex buffers to reduce the CPU time of passing the terrain chunks around, but this is fairly complicated since a complex cache system must be implemented. Terrain is meant to be editable in real time and creating/destroying vertex buffers is too slow for this. So this theoretical caching system should give timers to a chunk. If a chunk has been edited in the last N seconds it is very likely that it will be edited again, so no vertex buffer should be used. A chunk that hasn't been poked in ages should use vertex buffers. And the system should handle fast buffer migration for high speed terrain traversal. Complicated.
Next I show dynamic view distance. Again, every 1-2 seconds I increase view distance, from 7 to 19 (radius). Farther view distance is not really feasible, not because of the far plane, but because the terrain does not support LOD and is also bus capped, so after a point you spend a fixed and far too large time span just passing on blocks. More that it takes the GPU to render them. Version 2 of the terrain should have at least a simple LOD solution to approximately half the resolution of distant blocks, maybe even insert them into the same buffer.
Next is adaptive detail mapping. The engine supports this feature separately for medium and high quality terrain rendering, each with its own settings. By default for medium we have a distance of 700 and for high of 2000, but for the video I lowered it to 100 to show what the effect does. Alternatively there is a super fast variant of the algorithm that does not do anything for pixels outside the radius, instead of the smooth blending. This can boost performance somewhat, but does give a visible circular edge around the character. At a distance of 2000 this edge is only noticeable when you look for it, but by default I use the higher quality blending. Performance be dammed, look good!
Next is a new arrival: day and night cycles! I have a very complicated lighting scheme and making it behave consistently and also transition smoothly from day to night is a real nightmare. I am not 100% happy with the results, but it is a good start. The night is intentionally bright and clear.
And finally we have the personal light source/torch. During the day it over illuminates everything as it should and by night it gives good visibility for close-by objects. It was very hard to find a configuration that did not produce very desaturated/washed out colors on objects. Oh god, dynamic lighting is so hard. I don't like the way the point light illuminated the terrain though. It is unrealistic, with some points creating a wrong illusion of depth and facing. But I'll keep it like this for now.
With version 1 the terrain is finished. I did not show it in this video, but the terrain is still editable in real time, changing the height and texturing. I will try to release the source code of the core of it soon. I won't start working on version 2 of the terrain, which should one day allow for LOD switching and smart vertex buffer usage.
The next engine feature videos will show off the in game material editor and container/character inventory.
With everything going seemingly so well, it is important to mention things that don't work properly.
Number one is point lighting. It is just wrong. I have the feeling that there is somewhere a very basic error that permeates everything and once I find, it will fix everything. I upgraded the normal G-buffer to show normal-map enhanced normals, not just vertex based normals, and this causes the normals to rotate around wildly as objects are rotating. This clearly illustrates that there is a fundamental flaw in normals and the way point lights interpret them.
Second is physics timing. The calculations I had in the past where wrong. I have fixed it but I'm not sure yet that the values are correct. With real values, physics actually is a huge performance bottleneck (it was before, only the measurements were lying to you). The good news is that I added multi-threaded support for physics and it scales very well with the number of cores, so if you have 2/4 cores instead of one you should notice a good improvement on physics times. The bad news is that I will probably have to scale back the map size. My i7 can handle the huge 64 square kilometer map decently, but slower machines might have a lot of troubles. Maybe even do a lot of small areas that are separated by caves and passages to hide the loading bars and limit the physics to only one region at a time.
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