Today's post is about optimizing and what a time sink it can be.
My own pc is pretty powerful but has a major problem with shiptrails. So when I'm noticing a drop in framerate its usually shiptrails at fault. Unfortunately this also means my pc is badly suited for testing whenever a mission is too heavy on a pc. With the result that I've been incredible lazy when it comes to adding LOD's and checking texture file sizes etc. I was also of the mindset that because most of my ships are rather low poly to begin with, adding LOD's was just a waste of memory, time and effort.
But then my testers started reporting rather bad frame rates in one mission so I finally got off my ass and decided to see what could be done better.
I then lost two whole days reexporting old models that had only a LOD 0 and finding oversized animated glowmap frames and resizing them. Hardly fun. And worse, I can't tell the difference on my own pc
So if WoD will end up running like utter crap on your pc, you can blame my "Hurrdurr I have a 260GTX videocard so the rest of the world has one too" mentality
I also ended up writing 30+ tech room entries but I decided against posting bits of it here because most of the entries will be slowly added as you progress through the campaign. Sorry to the folks that wanted to read some in universe fluff!
Overal I'm making pretty good progress, only a few more assets and the last few missions have to be done now. If I don't get distracted by feature creep (or optimizing!
) we might see a release in one or two months time.