The last few days I've been working on upgraded tree rendering system. It needs to support a few million trees per world. I use a static imposter system at far distances, a dynamic imposter system for nearer trees, and trees near the camera are rendered full 3D.
Hardware instancing using multiple vertex streams is the key. There is no LOD/culling on trees in the below screenshots, so I'm rendering the millions of trees every frame. This is mostly to help give an idea how slow things will be running with 16,000+ dynamic imposters on all the entities in the game world. Performance is not bad even on my aging 3 year old computer.
Sun Rendering
I've also made a pass on the sun rendering and the night-skybox rendering code. The full dynamic 24-hour day system is almost *something something complete*. *something something dark side*. And by that I mean it's just about functioning again. If you remember my previous post about a week ago, I've had to re-write my HDR pipeline. So I'm going over all the effects and updating them while re-integrating them with the new pipeline.
Everything shown in these screenshots is faked using my own approximations, no fancy atmospheric scattering algorithms here ... just good old fashioned smoke and mirrors ;-o It's still a work in progress.
All this graphics stuff...what about gameplay
Yes I'm aware a tree-renderer isn't the goal here ... but in order for me to be excited about a project I have to keep updating the gfx lol. I am about to transition heavily into work on the integrated WYSIWYG editor, also building up the Real-Time Strategy interface. This is going to be a full-on strategy wargame. The kind of thing I've always wanted to make. Obviously you can also control any unit on your team, at any time - which makes things more interesting.
Screenshots...
Please don't hate me because I don't thumbnail my screenshots :-p
- Dan
