Welcome back to another Corporeality weekly update, where unfortunately this week has been yet another one of these weeks where we’ve not had the opportunity to put a great deal of effort into the development process for various reasons.
The area we’ve managed to put time into this week has been the antiquated shader pipeline that defines how exactly we render stuff like ships, asteroids, and missiles in the game.
We’re currently in the middle of a redesign of the shader pipeline in order to enable us to define more stuff as part of our assets instead of manually changing stuff in the renderer code all the time. This is, unfortunately, quite a large effort that will take some time, but as a result we should end up with vastly improved rendering performance once it’s all done. For example, around 40% of the rendering cost could be completely eliminated on a MacBook Pro from 2018!
Over the coming weeks, my available time to work on the coding part of the development process may unfortunately be limited more than usual, but I’m hoping to finally get some more of the prototype features implemented sooner rather than later (for example, ship destruction and better multiplayer support would be great!).
Over time we’ll also continue to work on the core engine infrastructure like updating the shader pipeline. Stuff like this isn’t always the most interesting to read about, but it really helps us in the long run as we continue to push our engine technology further forward.
Thank you so much for continuing to stick with us on our journey, and, until next week, goodbye!