The zone
What you need, sir, is a list!
- Fixed a few issues with AI behaviors, especially involving warp rail usage.
- Finally removed SFML font dependency. All font rendering is now performed using LTE's SDF-based font engine. And it all works wonderfully
- Implemented kerning caching in SDF font engine. Text rendering doesn't even show up in the profiler anymore...
- Loads of minor tweaks to the market widget
- Performance optimization...unfortunately we seem to be dipping a bit too low for my liking (~40 FPS in a populated system) at the moment, and I'm trying to handle it. With all the content that's been added this 'month' (new ships, new planet shader, loads of graphics tweaks, all those warp nodes, etc.) there's quite a bit going on now, and I'm going to have to start getting more serious about optimization as we move toward beta.
- Added resolution control to UI layers, such that layers can be over-sampled or under-sampled. I wanted to see if oversampling the HUD layer could fix the minor bluriness of the corners (caused by stretching the texture over a cylinder). Indeed, oversampling at about 1.5x resolution fixes this. But I'm still not sold on text with curvature...it just feels odd, even if it's clear. I think I will ultimately go with a flat HUD as the default, as it's simply the king in terms of readability. Still, it's excellent to have control over UI layer sampling rate.
- Tweaked procedural color grading to having lower amplitude and higher lacunarity. Basically, what this means is that the overal amount of grading is lower, but fine details are more prominent than they were before, compared to coarse details. I find that this is, overall, a lot more pleasing. The previous settings felt a little too close to a simple 'colorize'-type thing. But the power of color grading is really in the subtleties, and amping those up in relation to the whole has created some significantly-more-appealing results
PS ~ If you're wondering, yes, this month has taught me a lesson about 'flexible' dev update dates. That obviously doesn't work I am going to regroup and rethink my strategy after this is over