pegwars : political economic and galactic warfare

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...

Stingray : the new engine Stingray is organised into a Channel strips. Each has a list of RenderChannels, and each of these have a list of DrawCommands. The strips and channels are created and arranged in an order specified by the game programmer. This design means that a Stingray game is not bound to forward-rendering, or deferred-rendering, single or multi-pass materials etc. It is completely flexible from this standpoint. Channel Strips are purely for convenience, they are repeatable blocks of Render Channels, for example implementing shadow-mapped light requires light-map-write and light-map-read channels. These two make up a LightMapChannelStrip; each light-mapped light thus creates its own LightMapChannelStrip. The fundamental drawing unit in Stingray, the DrawCommand, exists so that all draw commands can be sorted with respect to one another. This allow s each render channel to sort its draw commands to draw in the most optimal order. For example the depth-pass channel req...