Another week... another day... sadly even with shadow of Tech Demo 2 (TD2) release I cannot stop myself from another deep dive into technology changes. Sometimes I think that I'm addicted to this feeling when you finish changes and you know that you will never want to go back to old ways. But hey who cares .... TD2 is secured... kind of.
Little bit tired of work and my Danish lessons I finally sit down in front of my monitors trying to figure out where I left stuff yesterday:
***
- main loop - finished,
- multi-threaded upload of textures to GPU - looks that it working
- improve asset browser widget - finished.
- define content workflow - ....
Yeah .... there is this and terrain improvements... I'm tired.
This one thought an sight on my screen was enough to convince me that I need nap. I quickly grab phone laying close by and set alarm for 20 min later. I fall tired on my bed and next thing I remember is sound of alarm that I just set.
Compute shaders... I don't know why but this two words coming to my mind when I think about doing anything terrain related. Now all stuff are done on CPU and GPU computation would be great for terrain texture generation. Maybe it's time to finally implement this feature.
Once again sitting in fronts of my monitors. This time checking OpenGL documentation related to Compute Shaders. API is not really complicated, core 4.3 so I won't need to increase hardware requirements. Whole thing is simple: add support to it and use for generation of terrain data.
Only part that is not easy is to decide if I will be able to finish this changes before TD2. Terrain is big part of technology I creating and if I will start digging into it I will change few things that right now are not right. Amount of work will start grow with each change.
There is also this started task "define content workflow" which require from me replacing all textures masks (they defining visual properties of materials). When I will deal with this I will be finally able to start do some proper content and rendering improvement.
This forever existing feeling of hesitation and powerlessness toward amount of work... So much to do and so little time... I'm tired.
This one thought an sight on my screen was enough to convince me that I need nap. I quickly grab phone laying close by and set alarm for 20 min later. I fall tired on my bed and next thing I remember is sound of alarm that I just set.
Compute shaders... I don't know why but this two words coming to my mind when I think about doing anything terrain related. Now all stuff are done on CPU and GPU computation would be great for terrain texture generation. Maybe it's time to finally implement this feature.
Once again sitting in fronts of my monitors. This time checking OpenGL documentation related to Compute Shaders. API is not really complicated, core 4.3 so I won't need to increase hardware requirements. Whole thing is simple: add support to it and use for generation of terrain data.
Only part that is not easy is to decide if I will be able to finish this changes before TD2. Terrain is big part of technology I creating and if I will start digging into it I will change few things that right now are not right. Amount of work will start grow with each change.
There is also this started task "define content workflow" which require from me replacing all textures masks (they defining visual properties of materials). When I will deal with this I will be finally able to start do some proper content and rendering improvement.
This forever existing feeling of hesitation and powerlessness toward amount of work... So much to do and so little time... I'm tired.
This time I didn't gave up and started doing some preparation for compute shaders in engine. I will worry about all other stuff when we will be closer to TD2 release. For now I will focus on having some fun.
Greg