It’s been a bit of a mixed bag today, with a bit of everything going on in the project. I’ve been working on an alternative lighting method for the ship internals in an effort to improve performance on lower-spec machines, and to that end, I’ve now got a solution for some cheap lighting that doesn’t kill ambient occlusion. I need to keep experimenting to find the most visually appealing way of using it, but it could very well lead to some big performance improvements down the line. As a reminder, lighting is over 50% of the rendering cost right now, so it’s definitely worth the effort to try and improve it.
Meanwhile, I’ve also continued working on A Deck’s mid-section, widening the showpiece corridor by half a metre because it was feeling a bit narrow. The deck as a whole is wider than it was before anyway, so shaving off some width from the rooms isn’t really noticeable.
I also realised when measuring up the wall panels that I’d dug myself into a bit of a hole when it comes to the corners. I had the panels meeting each other flush at a 90-degree angle, which in practice is actually really awkward and not at all practical. So, I’ve now made a new engineering standard that calls for a minimum of a 50cm gap between any panel and an intersecting wall.
You can see how that will work here, where a 50x50cm corner panel will take care of any corner nicely;
I’ve updated the rest of A Deck to meet this new standard, and also finished the structure of the Conference Room and Armoury while I was at it;
As I work my way down through the ship I’ll update everything else to meet this new standard too, which actually opens the door to an interesting possibility. With the wall panels being mounted so precisely on set mounting points, swapping any panel for an alternative design becomes super straightforward. If I were to provide templates for example to cover every specific panel size (there will be hundreds), then that could be the beginnings of a Steam Workshop solution for player-made ship internals… food for thought!
I’ll finish on another bit of good news today. Now, bear in mind this is literally the very first implementation and it’s all a bit dodgy, in addition to the fact it’s running on a test map, but…
Yes, it is what it looks like 