DevLog: February 2017 - Graphics Rendering

[StuartMorgan]

Welcome to the Galaxial development log for February!

• Graphics rendering has been completely overhauled.

Throughout the development of Galaxial, optimizing graphics rendering has been very difficult and complicated. This is because the game has very few opaque/non-alpha masked objects. (The z-buffer doesn't work well for transparent polygons)

Previously all of the object graphics (asteroids, ships, particles etc.) were rendered back-to-front (Painters algorithm) with orthographic projection. Batching objects of the same sort and rendering them all in one go wasn't possible, and as a result there were a lot of draw calls/state changes.

After a lot of experimentation the game is now finally able to take advantage of z-buffering, alpha-to-coverage multi sampling and batching. This has boosted rendering performance by about 500-1000%

• Perspective projection instead of orthographic

In the video you can now see how the smaller asteroids seem a lot closer as the camera pans past them (they move a lot more), rather than all appearing to be at the same depth.

• FMOD Audio

Voice limiting is working really well. Thousands of sound effects can be played at once, but only the most audible or with the highest priority are heard.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qw9daXAcGY[/youtube]

[Dan]

Nice, thanks for the update and video! Keep them coming!

Glad to hear about those graphix improvements. Looks like we are getting closer to a finished game!

[Geach]

I like the addition of the distance of asteroids so it seems like a real field.

[TuriusRay]

I'm sorry Stuart but I'm more excited about what I readed on youtube than what this post says.

[Stuart]Currently looking into the idea of early access, rather than the planned "release only when its finished". The exact price tag hasn't been decided yet, but I would have thought no more than about $20-25.[/Stuart]

TAKE MY MONEY!