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Hi! I'm Dirkson. I'm trying to make one of the most accurate space combat simulation games. Ever.

For some reason this includes a lot more space cows and butter than I thought it would.

So far it's got voxels, multiplayer, heat simulation, kilometer long spaceships, real world materials, organic ships, and awesome music. Eventually, it's going to have AI crew, inertia, planets, and more.

  • Want to build a granite mothership with dozens of fighters? You can do that.
  • A spinning battleship with a three meter thick titanium hull? Sure, that too.
  • A butter asteroid-tug than melts whenever you turn on the engines? Of course!

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Backend Work

News

Hey all!

So image updates have been sparse since the last livestream. Why? I've been rearranging some of the ScrumbleShip backend. Let's dig into that a little.

Backend

Currently, the way rendering works is something like this:

    • One thread locates and Caches nearby blocks within your ship, storing its result inside the ship memory structure.
    • Another thread picks through your ships, locating and assembling blocks into a list. Then, it orders this list, and copies the Cache from its location in the ship memory structure to a temporary Voxel List. Once it's done with that, it goes through every other ship and does something similar.
    • The render thread uploads the entire Voxel List from system memory to gpu memory, every single frame, then renders it with a single opengl draw call.


There's a lot of weird behavior too, like backwards sharing of ordered ship-lists, which causes threads to wait for each other.

The biggest problem with this system is that it requires me to re-send ALL the voxel data EVERY frame. As the ScrumbleShip engine gets better at rendering voxels, I can both send more voxels to the gpu, and send more data about those voxels to the gpu. So I'm starting to use too much bandwidth between the computer's memory and its graphics card. For example, the extra data sent by the lighting change needlessly costs us around 10fps.

So reducing the number of sends is a high priority on my list. But as I was studying to fix the problem, I noticed several interesting facts about the current rendering pipeline, and I developed a plan to make it better. Here's an experiment I did to prove a particular point:

supposedtolooklikethat

This proved to me that I COULD render efficiently using multiple opengl draw calls, which opens up a lot of interesting optimizations.

So the new plan is:

    • One thread maintains lists of ships in distance orders and hands them out as-needed.
    • Another thread maintains lists of ship chunks in distance orders and hands them out as-needed.
    • Another thread uses these ordered chunk lists to create a list of visible blocks.
    • The caching thread goes through this list of visible blocks, preparing nearby blocks for rendering and storing the result in the ship chunk list.
    • The rendering thread goes through the list of nearby blocks, uploading their data to the gpu as they get close enough to render. Then it goes through the list of visible blocks, rendering them in batches using separate opengl
      draw calls.


What advantages does the newer pipeline have?

    • It'll render the nearest blocks, regardless of which ship they're in. No more weird block-unloading when two ships are close together
    • It'll operate smoother on multi-core machines, with less time wasted on waiting for other threads
    • It'll render very large ships and asteroids, up to 1km in diameter. The current system can't handle asteroids much bigger than 100m across.
    • It'll use less system memory to do the rendering.
    • I only need to upload/remove block data from the gpu when its render status changes, rather than every frame. Potentially 10-15fps boost.
  • It'll open the way for the following potential optimizations:
  • GPU-based Occlusion Culling, potentially a 2x-5x rendering performance boost.
  • Voxel-face rendering instead of entire-voxel rendering, for a potential 2x performance boost.
  • Distant ships can be rendered as billboards, for a solid performance boost.
  • Geometry-shader based dynamic voxel creation, with an unknown (1x-5x) performance boost.

Any disadvantages?

    • Rendering in multiple opengl calls costs anywhere from 2 to 10fps.
    • It causes Dirkson to work for a couple weeks on features that don't yet make good screenshots, videos, or bleeding edge releases.

At this point, I estimate I've got maybe another week left to switch to the new pipeline. Then I should start putting out cool videos like this one again:

I'm aiming for the next full release sometime in February. It'll contain the lighting changes, lots of performance improvements, the mining torch, a complete UI overhaul, and a building-system overhaul.

Cheers!
-Dirk

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ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.23 - Windows

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.23 - Windows

Demo 1 comment

Alpha release 0.23 of the ScrumbleShip Demo, released for free on a Creative Commons License.

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.23 - Mac OSX

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.23 - Mac OSX

Demo

Alpha release 0.23 of the ScrumbleShip Demo, released for free on a Creative Commons License.

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.23 - Linux

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.23 - Linux

Demo

Alpha release 0.23 of the ScrumbleShip Demo, released for free on a Creative Commons License.

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.20 - Windows

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.20 - Windows

Demo

Alpha release 0.20 of the ScrumbleShip Demo, released for free on a Creative Commons License.

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.20 - Mac OSX

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.20 - Mac OSX

Demo

Alpha release 0.20 of the ScrumbleShip Demo, released for free on a Creative Commons License.

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.20 - Linux

ScrumbleShip Alpha Demo 0.20 - Linux

Demo

Alpha release 0.20 of the ScrumbleShip Demo, released for free on a Creative Commons License.

Post comment Comments  (0 - 10 of 188)
epictyphlosion
epictyphlosion

Dead game?

Reply Good karma Bad karma+1 vote
ludsoe
ludsoe

I really should buy this.... Been watching it for a while.

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Phosphóros
Phosphóros

Is this game still in development?
Such a long time without news.

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dirkson Creator
dirkson

Just wrote an article about that, actually. It should be on the main ScrumbleShip page. Long story short: I've had some serious setbacks, but have restarted work and am making solid progress again.

Cheers!

Reply Good karma+2 votes
keyersuzi
keyersuzi

He has returned!

Reply Good karma Bad karma+3 votes
AceJoker303
AceJoker303

This looks like a great game. Albeit a couple years old.

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Lord_Creed
Lord_Creed

this game looks awesome, and i was wondering, will there be shields with higher and lower capacity and will there be any projectile weapons?

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Insolent.
Insolent.

Hey - I'm not the dev, but he has long discussed various projectile weapons like railguns, gauss coil guns, regular gunpowder guns, and various missiles/rockets. Those should be pretty awesome in effect once the physics engine is fully implemented! The voxel damage engine already works, and you can imagine how chewed up ships will get by projectile weapons.

Right now there's only a prototype laser that - depending on its power setting - gradually heats and melts blocks at low levels, or instantly vaporizes voxels at high levels. In future, energy weapons will draw from the ships' power grids, so projectile weapons will have the advantage of not producing as much waste heat and hogging power. Although railguns and gauss guns will draw power of course, and their power levels will also be adjustable to vary the velocity.

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moddlord1
moddlord1

coool!1

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BrandonZ201
BrandonZ201

Thanks for this awesome graphic update!

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Latest posts from @scrumbleship

Just uploaded a new bleeding edge. It's pretty broken, but it's an excellent start!

Oct 25 2016

Three items until the next bleeding edge release. Progress again! : )

Oct 25 2016

Excellent! I've just put in an order for a device that should make the next livestream a -lot- smoother.

Sep 20 2016

RT @tobyfox: If you want to test the Linux (Ubuntu) version, opt into the steam Beta branch "linux_test" using the password "spaghettilasagna"

Jul 17 2016

And that's it! Absolutely everything is migrated over, and appears to be working well. Better than it ever did, actually : )

Jul 7 2016

Migration to the new server 90% complete. Now time to hit pillow. *THUD*

Jul 6 2016