pegwars : political economic and galactic warfare

Work on the game is ongoing!  Since my last posts about evolving cities, I've done a lot of work improving the game - especially the evolving cities, clouds and overall performance.  I can now run the game in ultrawide resolution at 30fps on planet surfaces, which are the most costly scenes to render.   This is a major achievement for my game engine, and will unblock the development of many features to come. Improvements to Evolving Cities There are many improvements to the evolving cities simulation.   Road biomes (I haven't done road meshes yet) connect major installations, and residential / city zones are more likely to grow along these corridors.   New installations are built in proximity to the headquarters.   The roads are generated using an adaptation of the erosion code, in order to find the path-of-least-resistance. Cities evolve along road lines connecting major installations This city formed around a seam of crystals The Empir...

I play Pegwars far more often than I work on it.   To be honest, most of the time when I sit down after-hours to work on the game, I simply don't know where to start.  I have so many 'backlog items' and ideas and the scope of the game is so huge that it's often really hard to choose exactly what to do.  The "burden of choice" as they say. So more often than not I'll simply hop in a spaceship, fly to some random systems in the galaxy, snap some screenshots and try to get inspired to work on some new feature or polish an existing one.  Indeed I've spent so much time 'searching for inspiration' that my current screenshots folder, which goes back to June 2015, currently has 5623 screenshots totalling 63.9GB... Since the new cloud shader went in, I've come across some really moody-looking systems and planets.   Systems with a dark green sun where you can barely see.   Blue suns, Bright orange suns.  Thick rolling clouds that reach down to the...

Volumetric Raymarching can be Very Costly Volumetric Raymarching can be very costly as many 100s of ray-marching operations are performed on the GPU each pixel for each frame.  A standard HD screen of 1920x1080 contains over 2 million pixels.    In the case of my atmosphere + cloud shader, this high fill-rate cost brings the game's frame-rate to its knees. In order to play Pegwars with cool new clouds in smooth realtime and iterate on the shader, I had to shade the planet and everything within the planet's atmosphere to a half-width, half-height render target.   This approach costs 1/4 of the fill-rate and renders around 4x faster, but the results as you can see are blocky and blurry.  Especially the building edges and the horizon lines are badly aliased : Multi-Resolution Shading As the atmosphere / cloud shader is very much fill-rate limited, either optimise the number of shader instructions per-pixel, or reduce the number of pixels shaded.  The goal...