Tworenas Snapshot 6

I am just realizing it right now: am I repeating the unfortunate naming incident of the planet Uranus? How do you native English speaking folks pronounce "tworenas". Is there any hidden "anus" in it?

So, snapshot 6 is out! Like I mentioned, this is half bug fixes, half graphics.

I made a ton of screenshot detailing the performance of the engine with the new tweaks, but I realized this is no place to show them all. So in words: on an Intel HD chip, performance was bad at 640x480: 30 fps. So I optimized the new effects and got a good improvement, but performance is still between 30 and 39 fps with light shafts:

So I added an option to turn them off:

Still, this did not greatly increase performance, The high quality terrain  terrain with multiple light support is a performance hog. So I went in and wrote the new multi light support shaders for low quality. High:

Low:

This helped a bit, but even the low quality is heavy because of the light processing, so I added a special variant to the shaders that is used when no lights are present and this shader is used on the appropriate cells of terrain.

So eventually I managed to squeeze out around 60 fps with light shafts:

Now, the default settings are on high and 1280p. I did some testing and setting them to low while maintaining resolution and light shafts gives you between 32 and 45 fps. Not ideal, but this is Intel onboard. Dedicated chips have an easier time. I can run the engine at 200-400 fps :).

Snapshot 7 or 8 might bring something really interesting, but I'm not sure I can pull it off yet, so not telling you what it is or making any promises.

BY AGREEING TO DOWNLOAD THIS SOFTWARE, YOU TAKE TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY CONSEQUENCE RESULTING FROM THE USE OR MISUSE OF THE SOFTWARE. I AM NOT TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY POSSIBLE HARM THAT CAN BE CAUSED BY THE SOFTWARE NOR DO I GUARANTEE THAT IT IS FIT FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR THAT THE INTEGRITY OF THE SOFTWARE WILL BE PRESERVED WHILE BEING TRANSFERRED ON ANY AND ALL MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

Link:  Snapshot 6

Changelog:

• Extended the skill tree and introduced the skill editor.
• Skill choices are now saved. (There will be a new option in the world manager to reset the skill points.)
• Grass system optimized to use advanced pools and caches while avoiding C# GC.
• Grass looks updated, with slope coloring and dynamic light support, with a maximum of 5 lights/cell.
• New Renderer component to isolate rendering from game logic.
• New ModRuleSet component to isolate mods and game rules from the rest of the game logic.
• New Grass class that abstract away the entire grass system into a simple to use component. The Grass class is part of the game library.
• Entire rendering and content management system refactored!
• Light shaft!
• Debug visualization support for vertex normals, pixel normals, tangents, binormals, depth.
• Mesh tangent seam correction at all UV seam included into to pipeline.
• Low quality terrain profile is back. Medium is still M.I.A.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed so incorrect tangents all over the place. In consequence, normal mapping pops more than usual and no longer changes direction based on angle.
• Some stability fixes on device change
• Grass lighting bugs fixed. Grass light can still sometimes be just a bit too neony, but this is not a bug, just a light scaling factor that is too high in the rendering profile. I will properly scale the lights when a GUI is introduced so you can control live the strength of illumination for the entire world.
• Fixed a major and quite old terrain bug. How tor reproduce: raise or lower terrain near your feet, then walk so far away that you can't see the spot you edited anymore. I mean that the spot should be outside of the fog barrier. Then walk more, to be absolutely sure that that region of the terrain has been removed from RAM and all caches. Then return to the original position and notice that a chunk of terrain around the spot you edited is invisible. You cans till walk on it and edit it as usual, and the changes are saved, the chunk is just invisible. Reloading the save fixes this. Because of the huge distance you needed to traverse from  the edited piece of terrain and return, I did not notice this bug before. The fix was one line of code.