| Alrighty, the second week passed and most of the graphical effects are implemented now. There will be some updates to the background sky and some additional asteroid types next week. Other than that not much more effects will be added yet. You can see the new radial blur effect (it won't be that strong all the time, only with speed boost item) and a nice post screen glow/bloom effect in the screenshot. There are currently around 10000 asteroids in the scene (clipped if not visible) and rendering is very fast (up to 13-20 mio visible polys/sec) with help of shader instancing :)
I've got still 2 major problems left: The first one is the performance of the physics calculations. For 10000 asteroids to check every one each frame if they collide with any other asteroid is computually very expensive. Even the visibility test gets very slow if a lot of asteroids are checked. I have to implement some clever checks to optimize this. The other one is a polygon based collision check for supporting not only round asteroids (that shouldn't be too hard, but it is a still a bit of work).
The game itself is missing too. Flying around works nice, but most of the game elements (menu, items, game dynamics, etc.) are still missing. For the level design I had some nice ideas too, which I will try out this week (required for the optimizations above anyway).
To be continued .. (next week) |  |