MX Simulator

sethypeety wrote: ↑Thu Dec 02, 2021 2:02 am

jlv wrote: ↑Sat Nov 06, 2021 1:01 am I'm definitely planning on making 4097x4097 terrain sizes practical so it should be possible to run a small scale and still have a reasonably large terrain.

I know this was almost a month ago now but I forgot to ask if there was a timeframe on implementing this, currently working on a project with someone and this would be an absolute life savor for me.

Here's a rough outline of how the terrain engine rewrite is going to go:

1. Keep a copy of the terrain in GPU memory and use it to directly calculate terrain normals in the fragment shader, which would eliminate reshading for erode. Right now they're baked into the terrain textures which is really efficient for static terrain but a nightmare when erode changes it.
2. Switch from using a lot of small textures for the terrain to a few really big textures. This will probably make 4097x4097 usable. This will also make it possible to add decals faster since they won't be scattered across a zillion different textures.
3. Tessellate the terrain in large chunks instead of down to the triangle like it does now. This will mean more triangles but they will be in larger batches which is better for big GPUs. At this point I'm hoping 4097x4097 will be faster than 2049x2049 is now.

If everything goes perfectly each step is only a few weeks work. But things don't usually go perfectly so who knows how long it will take. It's pretty easy to spend days finding the place where you wrote a + where it should have been a -, so it's kind of unpredictable.

Jakob Hubbard wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 1:35 am

jlv wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 1:23 am Basically what I've been doing for the last 6 months is

I would love to see more of these posts from you. Just status updates about what you're doing to the game excites me because it goes stale for a while and I'm curious about what's going on.

+1.

Also, as always, thank you JLV.

jlv wrote: ↑Mon Nov 15, 2021 1:42 am I definitely want to do UI/editor scripting when I'm done with the terrain stuff. Doing the UI and editor stuff in Javascript instead of C will be much more convenient and quicker to develop. Plus it will allow people to make their own extensions to the editor.

Duuuuuude. Badass!

will curved gradients be possible?

Jrife548 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 06, 2021 2:09 am will curved gradients be possible?

That would be a separate thing. I think a mesh might be a better idea than extending the current gradients to be curved.

Read through this post just now, so cool to see you still working away on this game we all love JLV, can't wait to see the changes and improvements when you release it. Seems like no matter how many people "retire" from this game something always brings them back