Tuesday 9 December 2014

Lightmapping Leaves The Building

On the advice of a member of the internal team, I decided to move the lightmapper to a separate external application in order to allow larger levels to be lightmapped and avoid any system memory shortfall or fragmentation for long game making sessions.


The result is a much more stable experience all round, and I am just going through the motions of testing to make sure nothing has broken. Also plan to have a new internal build for the testers this evening so I can double check the new way of lightmapping a scene works for all.

Also started to get some art from the new textured civilian character which is looking pretty sharp, and I hope to get an export soon to test the animations (which are fused with the ability to use ALL the weapon styles).  I have also identified some other system memory pockets that might allow some more savings, and getting the ESCAPE level to use less than 800MB of system memory would be a great place to be.

Hopefully I can bring better screenshots on Wednesday as it should be more a day of testing large levels than the grunt of adding and refining code.  My emphasis will be on stability, not losing my performance gains, having pre-bake and real time shadows for all scenarios and ensuring static and dynamic lights work across the board also. I think these are the principal priorities for V1.009 (amongst the other few hundred features that have been added since V1.008) :)

3 comments:

  1. That's for this evening. It's my main task now so all guns are trained on it ;)

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  2. NOICE! Moving the lightmapper to a separate exe was a brilliant idea! Give it the full 32-bit address space just for the lightmaps :)

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