Performance Work

So I decided to take a peek at performance lately. Although it was not bad (it was still capping out at 60 fps), I was still curious to see how I was spending my time. So I hooked up some timers and it turned out my occlusion tests were taking up around 50% of frame time (the other 50% roughly going to rendering - but that would include time waiting for vsync)! Some simple early returns using spherical tests brought it back down to 10% of frame time - a simple fix for an unexpected problem!

On top of this, I added some face merging/simplification code for my sprite-to-mesh generator. Again, not necessary - it was just for fun. Previously, I was generating vertices for each pixel from the source image, and using vertex colours to colour them. Ugly, I know, but dead simple and it worked.

Anyway, after a week of banging my head against a wall coming up with a working algorithm, I finally have results! It uses a fairly simple heuristic: try form the biggest face along the local horizontal (U-axis) and with that merged face, try form the biggest face along the local vertical (V-axis). It will not always find the most optimal result, but it is good enough and still a massive improvement from before.

This new mesh structure also means I cannot colour with vertex colours anymore. So colouring is now done through texture lookups of the original, source image. The texture is mapped in a following pass, once the simplified mesh has been generated.

Check out the images below. Happiness!

I do not have any hard performance numbers to show though. I think these changes would only be evident in GPU performance (not CPU), and I actually don't have any tools installed to measure that. I will hunt for some in the near future, but any recommendations in the meantime would be highly appreciated!

UPDATE: I realised this a few days after and thought I should note it here in case anyone tries it. The face merging algorithm described is bad. It creates T-junctions, which will produce rendering artifacts. The approach can be modified to correct this, but it is low on my priorities (I am not vertex-bound at the moment).

Before - no simplification

After - with simplification!

Nearly Done With New Title Screen

Decided to put in some time to implement a proper physics-based character controller for walking. It was a bit tricky... but I'm fairly happy with the results. Hooked up a basic SFX and music system too. Just a bit more polish left and on to more things! Build is available for download here too (you can try move the players around if you want). Music is from Jorge Boscan and sound effects generated by as3sfxr!

It's A Cold Night To Be Out...

Here is a really brief video of what I have been up to. It's the new title screen. It might not seem like much, but a whole heap of work has gone into this under the hood. There's the new deferred rendering, new behaviour tree for AI (a patrol behaviour is driving the dog back & forth), reworked serialization system, and just generally much, much, much cleaner code. It took awhile... but I think it will show its true worth in the future. More updates to come very soon!

If you want, you can download the build too. I have only tested this on like two computers though. ;-)

UPDATED: Changed the video (and download)... now with actual balloons! :)