Reflections on the Steam Summer Sale
Entry posted by Josh ·
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It's been an eventful first half of 2015, and the second half promises to be just as exciting. I'm happy to say the Steam summer sale was a big success. I haven't done the calculation yet, but this year's sale did a lot more than last year, and we keep adding more and more new users. So that makes me feel very good about the future.
I've begun researching a way to create our own built-in store based on Workshop and Steam microtransactions. This is the same system that TF2 uses for in-app purchases, but we have to do some fancy things for the file delivery system. If you are interested in publishing items to be sold, you can submit them now in the Workshop and you will be prompted to enter your bank information in Steam to receive payments directly from Valve.
I think this is also a good time to give the user base a few things they want, so I implemented resizable viewports for Linux on the beta build. It seems to work just fine.
I know vegetation is something a lot of people want, and I have begun researching this. My goal is to generate instances procedurally on the GPU without having to pass entity 4x4 matrices to the shader, which is the main bottleneck. This should make the new vegetation system a lot faster than what Leadwerks 2 had, and allow for much denser growth with basically no rendering cost. I think you'll see very very dense vegetation on screen with framerates that seem impossibly fast, up to a certain point.
The screenshot below shows an array of trees generated from a geometry shader. This just requires one instance of the tree to be rendered, and then the other trees are procedurally generated by the shader:
More information will follow as I learn more.
I'm also buying a new motherboard and condensing my main development machine down into a mini-ITX case. The best one I found for my purposes was the CoolerMaster Elite 130, which packs full-size components into a fairly small volume. I'll write about this once I get my parts and assemble it:
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