Einlander's Blog

I debug my game with vsync on to let me see what people with less capable cards are seeing. This sudden fps drop can cause you to watch the engine redraw the world allowing you to see behind walls.

I'm interested if you find some ways to keep high frame rate.

 

Your rooms will need doors , windows, you will need corridors, stairs, how will you manage that ?

Same for decoration like table, chairs and other decorative assets how will you manage to have the rooms with stuuf in the right place ? table at center, shelves on walls etc ... ?

How many dynamic lights per building or room ? How will they be placed on rooms ?

 

Keep the good work as project seems promising.

The building you see in the images is just a simple convenience store. It has the front store part, A storage/Stock room and the small room is the office. Other buildings will have different looks as long as you build the bsp tree properly. Corridors and hallways are currently just rooms where you simply don't build walls. As for windows and doors, I have yet to get that working. I have to build in a system where it recognizes outer walls and inner walls.

 

If you look closely at the images you will notice that each room has a gap on all sides. This is to allow an outside wall to be created so you can have bricks on the outside and drywall on the inside. doorways would simply be holes in the walls and a door jamb+ door prefab would link the 2 to hide the gaps.

 

So as to not play guessing games with entities, I will have to create yet another subsystem that will place the windows and doors on certain tiles (The buildings are made of tiles), store them in a list and apply them to the internal and external walls. The furniture and other things will follow similar rules, ie: rooms name is "Office", a desk goes in an office, on the desk will be a lamp, etc. I have a system that I created with the walls that will snap the to their cardinal direction (north, south, east, west) without rotation, that can be applied to furniture.

 

The lights are a bit simpler. If I turn off shadows on the directional lights, I go from 20-30 fps up to a solid 60 fps, but turning off shadows isn't ideal. So I have come up with 2 Ideas, when you leave the bounding box of a building, all props inside and maybe the walls will be hidden, All buildings behind the player beyond a certain distance will also be hidden. And to take it further, as the link in this thread shows http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/topic/9478-ps4-infamous-game-technical-details/page__hl__infamous , In my game it is not 1 solid world, it is divided into zones. All adjacent zones will be loaded and only displayed when the player is looking in their general direction. When the player moves to a different zone, all zones (x,z) positions get shifted to the old position and the player is warped to the inverse side/side opposite.

 

All this would keep the engine from drawing ridiculous amounts of buildings, and keeps the shadow shading low. Hopefully it will keep the fps at a bearable level. Also I manually enabled my release mode game to run with ATI crossfire (debug runs windowed, and release runs fullscreen 1080p).

 

I had a lot of downtime at work to figure all this and write it down.