slaen
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Terrain optimization
🕑 Added 2019-10-22 22:57:48 +0000 UTCMostly doing technical cleanup this week. I noticed the landscape was eating up a bunch of texture resources so I started digging in to solutions. I ended up rebaking out the entire heightmap and stepping down the resolution so the space the landscape takes up is still the same it just has less geometry and should run better at the cost of a little bit of terrain fine detail. I figure I can offset that detail loss with static terrain meshes and foliage and it won't be too noticeable.
The screenshot is the debug stuff I get to stare at when I'm doing similar work. The left image is the before and the main thing I'm fixing is the Terrain_Heightmap memory. Dropped it from 341 MB down to 85 MB. Which now I can use that texture memory on other things than just the ground.
I also decided to revamp the starting area a bit adding more changes in elevation to limit the sight lines and let the engine cull out the parts that aren't visible and at the same time shorten up the travel distances between points of interest. It should make the area feel more full and increase performance. Hopefully this is the last major landscape change that needs to be done moving forward and should give me a decent base.
I made some new rocks to use for cliff faces and to fill out some of the terrain. I was looking back at how they handled the terrain in Skyrim and they use rock static meshes everywhere to add interest and detail to the terrain.
Comments
E i G H T
Damn! You got great numbers off of that solution!
Nathan Martinez
The irony. During my playthrough of v1.3 I decided to explore the map. Basically exploring the map resulted in falling off the edge for an eternity. Took me back to the good old Morrowind days. Where instead of running around the mountian you just spam jump and spaz out until you make it. I'm sure the textures will make the infinite desert more lively. Huge map! Lots of space for towns, hidden cottages, ruins, and castles. Those along with interior spaces make for a lot of real estate.
