Comments - dirkson

Spent today improving performance again, as well as removing a few bugs.

Quick video showing off the performance improvements. On my machine, I've gone from seeing ~300,000 voxels at 20-30fps to seeing nearly 1 million at 40-50fps. And there's still a semi-easy 10-15fps I haven't chased yet!

NVidia's Linux Graphics Debugger. This is a major tool I used to improve graphical performance yesterday!

51FPS on a complex scene with twice the normal voxels. Earlier today, this would have run at 15fps.

Also, I got the occlusion culling code functioning again, resulting in increased draw distance for the same number of voxels.

It's really been a great day!

Cheers!

Discerning eyes should be able to pick out two minor lighting bugs in this image! +10 points to the first to spot each!

Is that supposed to look like that? I don't think that's supposed to look like that...

I'm doing some work on more efficiently rendering voxels, I guess I must have messed up a little : )

Cheers!

I wanted a screenshot of the big secret feature I'm working on, so I asked Psyrek to censor an image for me. He, umm... May have gone a little overboard. Sorry!

So some of the rotations broke the player model a little. That's a nice... face... thing... you've got there, Walloping.

Cheers!

And here's Walloping's lovely little ship after the rotation fix. All better!

She's a lovely, zippy little ship, too. Walloping built her out of mostly thinplate and scaffolding, making her light and agile.

Cheers!

A few of the graphic blocks were incorrectly rotated. So I fixed them! This... had a few side effects.

Don't worry though - Every single crazily-rotated block in this image I've actually already fixed. "After" image comes tomorrow!

Cheers!

"A still more glorious dawn awaits: Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. A morning filled with four hundred billion suns - The rising of the Milky Way." - Carl Sagan ( Youtube.com )

I improved the background galaxy slightly, based on a graphic released by the European Southern Observatory.

Cheers!

Still working on the fonts. These fonts have some alignment issues, but otherwise they're extremely well performing. A font-heavy screen used to slow rendering down by 10-20fps, now it's lucky if it can get 1-3fps of slowdown.

Cheers!

Sometimes things don't quite go right. This was an attempt at using "open-simplex" noise instead of random noise to provide some texture for the blocks. This was what happened when I first enabled it - Not quite what I wanted.

Eventually I was able to get it working correctly... But then it just looked like I messed up the lighting engine, so I reverted. The whole experiment took maybe an hour, and now I have open-simplex noise available if I want it in the future.

Cheers!

I think the man in the screenshot would agree with that, yes :D

I was exploring an asteroid when I came across this large vein of dense iridium ore.Iridium has a high melting point, a large thermal capacitance, good conductivity, and high density, making it an excellent armor against thermal and radiation damage. This much iridium is enough to thinly clad even a truly huge ship.

Cheers!

The same x-type asteroid, with color corrected, and a smoother noise. I think it looks a little nicer.

Cheers!

A very physically-accurate X-type asteroid, composed of 90% iron(Brownish), 9.84% nickel(Grey), 0.1% Cobalt(Not pictured), 0.05% Germanium(Dark Grey), and 0.01% Gallium(Not pictured).

X-group asteroids are roughly 17% of all asteroids. Finding an asteroid like this would be a ticket to a solid spaceship in rapid order - Almost all of those blocks are solid material, with very little chondrite and other impurities.

Cheers!

We reduce distant ships to shells to make them easier to render. This is an image of the new asteroids taken from the interior of one of those shells.

I actually significantly improved the shelling algorithm a day or two ago. Previously, it left small nodules of unfilled space on its interior. Now it's both faster and more accurate.

Cheers!

Got the asteroid layering done. The asteroids you see here are a debug type asteroid, with a thin exterior smattering of chondrite (grey), a layer of copper/silver(brown/light grey), and an interior layer of silicon, sulphur, chondrite, and kaolinite.

The interior layer is roughly half the diameter of the exterior layer.

The only asteroid generation feature left is to adjust the material density of individual blocks. I hope to get that done today.

Cheers!

I placed a few lights on the asteroid, to make it more visible. You can see sort of a lumpy potato shape in this asteroid, and speckles of various materials.

Cheers!

Sulfur! Apparently all that glitters is not gold ; )

Cheers!

I'm finally starting to get somewhere with the new asteroid generation code!

This is a more-or-less accurate modelling of a B-type asteroid. I'll have a closer image for you tomorrow, and an article about asteroid generation sometime this week.

Cheers!
-Dirk

I'm afraid the work I'm doing at the moment doesn't screenshot all that well. Here's something of a sneak peak, though!

On the left, you can see the formatting specification for asteroid types. It allows me to specify the chance of a particular type of asteroid occurring, how many layers the asteroid has, what materials are in those layers and how they're distributed, and if those materials have any materials commonly associated with them.

On the right, you can see some of the C structures necessary to read convert this data format into a C-usable format.

Once this is done, we should have nicely potato-shaped asteroids with accurate-to-real-life materials and material groupings in them. Perfect for mining.

Cheers!
-Dirk

Today's work marks the last of the outstanding bugs on the released version - Any remaining bugs should be both minor and scheduled to be fixed in a future version.

I also separated out the main server from a new "testing" server, which should allow me to test future versions of ScrumbleShip without blowing up anyone's ships. "Bleeding Edge" ScrumbleShip should connect to that server automatically.

Today's image is a ship walloping built. Decently fun to fly, and quite zippy, due to a large number of engines and a lightweight interior.

Cheers!
-Dirk

A cool cube Walloping is building. I believe it's got a throne room inside.

...Walloping may have been assimilated by the borg. We're not quite sure yet.

Cheers!
-Dirk

ScrumbleShip currently has a lot of ships, and displaying them all perfectly would take an incredible amount of resources. Thankfully, once you wander far enough away from a ship, it has a tendency to look more like a point of light than anything.

It used to be that for ships that were far enough away, I just drew them as points. This worked fine for smaller ships, but less well for big ships. So what I switched to instead was displaying ships based on their apparent size on the screen. I think this has made it a lot harder to notice that ships degrade into single voxels in the distance.

Cheers!
-Dirk

Oh noes! I guess I should start hitting alt before I take screenshots :D

I think someone has constructed a ship very much like the Kestrel, from FTL.

The copious retro thrusters are a good idea - Lots of people forget them, and it makes it easy for their ships to sail off into space.

Cheers,
-Dirk

The new release has brought about a flurry of activity on the server. Here's a space elevator someone is building. I think.

It's quite the eye-catcher, and there are several starter ships parked around it - I assume people keep flying to it to take a look!

Cheers!

Walloping was building quite a bit during the ramp up to the re-release, and he began to get frustrated at several slope variations being missing. This is his (successful!) attempt at building something so big and obvious that I would shamefully put in the blocks he needed.

Thanks Walloping!