Project Update: Solar Flux

Feature: Mesh-Batching

In my last post, which I admit was a while ago (this is because I've been adding loads of new features to Unholy Mess), I was ranting on about Mesh-Batching.

Well since that post, I've integrated Azzaman's Frustum detection and my Bounding Volume Hierarchy code, which means non-visiable meshes are actually not draw, which inadvertantly boosts the total number of meshes that you can play with in a scene to about 100 thousand, which is actually absolutely insane.

So as a result I knocked togeather a little video of an asteroid field, with some depth of field applied (DoF is very expensive, my little laptop cries and slows down to 30FPS), I also did a quick flocking algorithm and stuck some drones in to help give the scene a sense of scale, at which point I removed the DoF. Everything is happily rendered in full HDR !

Anyways, enjoy.

Project Update: Solar Flux

Solar Flux: Othala Game Engine & Gebo Physics Engine

I've recently started the Bounding Volume Heirarchy for Solar flux. If you don't know a BVH is basically a Heirarchy tree which stores well pretty much whatever you want, withing a bunch of bounding volumes.

Building the generic bones was rather easy, and I'm impressed with the results this far, traversing the BVH is amazingly quick, I ran a few tests, and using a single thread it could traverse 80,000 nodes in 0.05 seconds, which considiering I haven't optermised it yet, I must say that's a fairly impressive number, and better still when rendering 100, 1500 polygon meshes using normal mapping and ambient colouring it only took 0.005 seconds.

I also finished up parts of the renderer, I've introduces effect technique manipulation and some new lighting methods. While the basic renderer is finished so to speak, you merely need to supply it with a mesh and something will render, that rendering usually takes place using predefined material and effect settings. I've added the ability to render meshes with external techniques and effects as well, so the engine doesn't require each mesh to have static effects, which isn't the case anyway, its purely for render speed that the extra memory is spent.

Solar Flux: R.U.S.T.

R.U.S.T. or The "Really Useful Shader Tool", is a basic material editor which is being built for use with the engine.

I switched out the method of material colouring assignment, so it uses a Colour Swatch, this should dramatically speed up the amount of time it takes to build a material for meshes. I also fixed some generic bugs lurking in the system.

R.U.S.T. still requires alot of work, and some of those tasks include Axis offsetting, Lighting manipulation, Null Correction and Particle Effect Assignment.