Well I'm actually not quite done with the imposter system...I have to extend it to work for actors & vehicles, should be done tommorow.
POST PROCESSING OPTIMIZATIONS
Previously I was rendering the bloom / motion blur / depth of field in seperate passes and it was totally fill-rate limited because I was doing the effects @ screen resolution [well the motion blur at least]. I was unable to get more than ~80 FPS on my computer [DualCore 2.4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 8800] @ 1024x768...
Now I combined them all into a single pass & shader...which just operates on a single A8R8G8B8 512x512 texture and then blurs it into a 256x256 texture which is then used for all post processing effects. I write the x velocity of each pixel into the r, the y velocity into the g channel. I also write the depth of field value into the b channel, and I'm using the alpha channel to modulate the heat-blur effect.
Here is a screenshot of the motion blur with a left -> right camera movement...
Early Depth of field screenshot...
Another one...I've move the far plane even farther back since this screenshot...I think it adds a mysterious atmosphere to the game ;-)
Actually these screenshots are wrong because the sky was being cleared to "full motion blur in all directions" so it's double blurry...
Bloom...
IMPOSTER RENDERING
Yea so the theory behind an imposter system is that instead of rendering a mesh you render a dynamic 2d sprite of the distant mesh instead. The cached sprites are generated in real-time by rendering to a texture.
This is going to be applied to all meshes in-game...actors, vehicles, objects. That was the big-time bottleneck before this.
Reference image showing a field-o-objects...~1000 of them to be exact. Notice the 14 FPS in the bottom left of the screenshot. Not good.
Now using an imposter system....117 FPS.
That is actually totally limited by the shadow maps I'm using a 2k^2 texture and a 1k^2 texture at the highest settings. It scales down to use 2 1k^2 shadow maps, and the frame-rate goes up.
Also it should be noted that actually rendering a city will take the frame-rate down by about 30%. The cities just sit in static VBs 90% of the time, and render quite fast.
Another screenshot with shadows turned off...205FPS. The tree mesh is ~550 triangles. There are ~1000 of them.
Debug output of the imposter textures...
Older/incorrect screens...~1000 trees, 500 tris each.
I'm getting this to work with the actors...it's just about done. Totally limited by the shadow map rendering...if I render no imposters / meshes I still get 150FPS with the 2k^2 shadow maps regardless of screen resolution.
These things can pan-out very differently on different hardware, so I've got some testing to do...but it's obviously going to be a major tool in keeping the frame-rate playable on lower end computers.
Also for those of you who want to be in the beta [grin] here is how my to-do list is looking...
-Get 3rd and hopefully final iteration of traffic AI working.
-Finish orders/gameplay aspects.
-Client side prediction on vehicles + actors to make network play seamless.
-Finish basement/illegal business artwork.
[DONE]-Imposter Rendering System
-City Editor / City format 2.0
[DONE]-Optimize Post processing / light weight bloom
I dunno...a month+ probably but we'll see how things go...
Thank god I'll be able to use this tech for any other games I come up with. I think I could use all this as a base and crank out pretty much anything in a matter of 1.5 years...verses the 3 years it has taken me to learn / code all this stuff.
- Danny
