Another non-numbered update. For the last two weeks I've been struggling to get anything done at all, so I've only really spent three or four days actually being productive, but I finally got another piece of the puzzle done.

Dividing the scene into octants and checking whether those are visible to the camera in order to filter out anything that isn't from rendering.



The reason a lot of things still don't disappear here is that most stuff outside of the town centre is still all on one big model and not separate objects, so some part of it is always visible to the camera. Might be time to start breaking it up soon.

Bit messy and difficult to see, but a picture of how some octants get subdivided into even smaller octants depending on whether they're able to fully enclose any objects within those:



I'm not completely done, but enough for a post just to show where I'm at.

Beautiful! It's interesting how they seem to look more defined when they're smaller, perhaps because any outlines that are a bit dithered at full res bleed together into solid lines when downscaled? I like how saturated the first one of the small ones seems!

I believe! No AI needed!

At least it wasn't the code progress you lost!

Gonna have to hold back on checking out the code so that I can get stuff done myself, but sharing it is cool!

Refactoring code is really not a lot of fun, is it? You spend days working on it, sometimes we just stare at the code thinking of all the ramifications of each change. When you think you are done there are trillions of bugs to fix before it compiles again. When it finally compiles again it works exactly as it did before you did all this. The progress is invisible.

Thisssss. At least we understand each other when it comes to this And now the stage is set for adding new stuff in a smoother way, like those doors, yay!

Just watched it, really cool to see so much of it in action. You two were fun to listen to, and the game looks like it plays really well already! Since your devlog says it's at 60% now, what would you say those remaining 40% are?

Wow, I'm glad to see that the project is still alive and it's looking better than ever. Awesome job, keep it going!

Heyyy, welcome back! Thank you! Sorry to hear you haven't had time to work on your stuff, hope you can soon.

Is this a one person project? If so, quite impressive. If not, still impressive. Oddly enough it reminds me of like a mashup of Katamari Damacy (visually, mostly) and Shadows of Memories. Maybe a bit of Myst in there.

Yeah, just me. Thanks!! Katamari is an interesting thing to compare it to haha

That sounds really cool, good luck!

Thanks! Spent most dev time this year on writing/story so it's coming along but taking a break and getting back to tech for a bit now. I did get the game running on Android early on but I think the final game will probably be too heavy for a phone. Ảo means salt/sea!

Whew, sorry about that heat… That's a lot. In-game movement looks good!

Wonder if you can get that working with any program using something like Reshade…

Those are a lot of tiles, and good-looking ones, so I think you should be very happy with what you accomplished in the time you had! Love how organic everything feels. Curious about all these fancy round symbols on walls.

Nice! Looks really good.

Thanks, glad y'all like the non-game updates too! C:

Working on cascaded shadow maps now, i.e. using lower resolution shadows further away from the camera.



More extreme difference to show it clearly:



Currently actually makes performance worse because now I render the whole scene and at the same level of detail three times instead of one, so the next step is to actually not render more than necessary and to have some lower-detail versions of things when they're far away (the trees especially, my graphics card really doesn't like those).

Also poked at the shader again a little bit, so here's a screenshot I'm happy with:

Adding gamefication elements to debugging tools

At least if I get work done on the game I'll get to play the game!

It is admirable how much work you put into improving tools to make your own job easier. I feel like I really should follow your example more.

To be fair Unreal comes with a lot of stuff out of the box!

This is great! Whenever I've done 3D rendering stuff in the past the render pipeline has always been a big hardcoded mess that's hard to keep track of, so seeing it laid out like this is lovely.

Hasn't always been this neat but I overhauled it fairly recently! c:

I'm curious what details you show for each buffer in the UI when you expand it? Do you have a display of the contents of the buffer?

Yeah! Here are some examples:

Cellos and Carrillion sounds intensify

Interesting how the UI feedback loop itself is a sort of motivator for perf optimizations, no?

Yeah! Always an upgrade the less of a little dance I have to do when I want to add something new.

Took a break for a week and then got back to fixing backend stuff.

Accidentally made Obra Dinn!



The only slightly interesting thing to show is more stuff that can be updated while the game is running, like turning off shadows and stuff:



This GIF is quite laggy and a big reason is that shadows are very slow right now, so that's partially why I want this feature since I think I'll finally get around to implementing those properly soon.

Ohh, scary Can't wait to hear more of the music!!

 

That looks so cool! Would love to see it without the filter too. Looking forward to hearing what you decide on for progression

While I don't understand the specifics of what you're doing, I know the feeling! Hope it works out

Welcome back! 250 sounds like a lot to me too Really nice post, fun to read how it all went and what you took from it. Still think this looks amazing and looking forward to release. Hadn't seen the lightning before, very cool! Is the off kerning on the "m" in "laundromat" intentional?

Still think this looks really nice, sorry you're not getting more replies here! Good luck with the contest