Added a performance graph and optimized the model debugging (and a buttload of "engine-stuff")

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Phew! Today was optimization day. Shoutout to theagentd for helping me with optimization over skype and teaching me some things about memory management and data reading and writing on the CPU. Overall, I increased textured rendering speed by 1.5x!

I've finally released a version of Naroth that supports the russian language (and also includes new images for the character creation process). Both combined look like this:

Do you use automatic lightmap coordinates generation, or are your meshes parameterized?

I calculate the lightmap UVs by finding the distance between the polygon vertices and normalizing them

I ran some small tests on Vulkan pipeline creation. Vulkan has two ways of improving the performance of creating pipeline objects: derivatives and pipeline caches. Derivatives allow you to hint Vulkan that there are big similarities between two pipelines you want to create and that the driver should do its best to reuse data from one pipeline when creating the second one. A pipeline cache is an object you pass in when creating pipelines, and the driver is free to store and read data from the cache when creating pipelines. In addition, this cache object can be serialized to disk and reloaded later, allowing you to persistently save the cache between runs of your game, improving load times after the first run.

I simply ran a small test creating 1000 pipelines 100 times and measuring the average time it took:


In other words, on Nvidia drivers derivative have no impact on load times, but the cache does take off almost 10% of the load time. In addition, the cache is thread-safe, allowing you to use the same cache from multiple threads. Looks like the simplest and fastest solution is to ignore derivatives and just multithread the whole thing while using a pipeline cache, at least on Nvidia. If someone has an AMD GPU, it'd be interesting to see how their driver deals with this.

EDIT: The above tests created all pipelines using a single vkCreateGraphicsPipelines() call to create all 1000 pipelines. If I create 1 pipeline at a time using one vkCreateGraphicsPipelines() call each, it takes around 92ms even with a cache.

Today I made a console for my game.
I will use this to easily test features in my upcoming game (but I am planning to leave the console in the game).
It doesn't have many commands as of now but i will extend it

Today I made the thing with my DataProvider classes (had a recent What I did today post according to that, TL;DR all game assets and stuff are loaded through an abstract data provider class and I already had several implementations to e.g. map folder to memory and so on) even better:
GameCreator is now enabled to write the release version of the game directly to memory, starts the GamePlayer as a second process which then loads from it (over socket connection) - so no data is written to disc and it is quite fast

Ray traced shadows now instead of bounding box :0
Textured

Not textured

Textured

Not textured

Just Windows. (I guess?)

And when it comes to overheating... Shouldn't CPU automatically shut down when its sensors detect that temperature gets too high? Intel CPU's have special sensor that do emergency halt on hardware level when reaching high temperature (something like 90-95 degrees, exactly 93 on my old laptop), without communicating with OS or even BIOS.

More like "what I did yesterday" (or well, technically today very early morning) - found this:

https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qstage/

The site for JGLOOm is finished! And so is the maven deployment. If anyone finds some errors, please let me know! (Issue trackers don't work on forked projects, PM me )

http://jgloom.org/

I integrated @philfrei soundscapes into Vangard. There is a night and day soundscape, I just need to tweak them now and add tense/relaxing flavors (so countryside near towns has a relaxing ambience, while deep wilderness has more frequent tension-inducing sounds). Then add some accents, like a dawn chorus of birds, rainfall, variable wind.

I will give sound a plugin architecture, so I can have a default sound system using a few samples and TinySound, and will then wrap @philfrei's work in a plugin.

While i am doing that, I will also complete the work to make the game's UI a plugin too, so I can easily deploy different views when bored. Like Vangard Isometric, Vangard Third-Person View, Vangard First-Person View, and Vangard VR. Plenty stuff there to keep me busy till 2020

(Seriously, I have one user - 50% of my user base! - that has requested an isometric/RTS-style view, so I would like to add that, but still keeping the simple Vangardy look and feel).

The idea was always to have swappable graphics, as a way to make sure my presentation code is strictly separate from my game logic. As a way to force me to do that, I chose Java2D as my initial graphics library

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@ShadedVertex, are you sure you need 3D? It's hard to think of a game that is restricted by its very nature to just one form of representation.

The problem with VR is first-person motion makes people sick. I have the idea to combine the zooming mechanic with VR so that when you are standing still or only moving a little (roomscale?) you can be in VR-first person mode, but otherwise you are in zoomed out VR birds-eye view mode (still in VR, but not in first-person VR).

jME has some support for VR, so all i need to do is figure out how to to export a view of the world to a jME instance, and of course rebuild the GUI controls for VR. A couple of days work, surely!

With flexible graphics plugins, there is always the hope that @theagentd will be a huge fan and will upload a free fan-made plugin with gorgeous 3D models, shaders and stuff.

Heh, please don't count on that, as I'm very low on free time nowadays. xd Still, I might take a look at some point. =P