Monday, June 21, 2010

More on Underwater Warps


OK, confirming that I made the right decision, the non-HLSL warp slotted in extremely clean, with about half the code as before. I've also been able to get underwater polyblends for free by blending the texture with the polyblend colour (this was already done for the HLSL warp but never for this), and have made several overall improvements to the warping effect.

It now no longer sizes up slightly when you go underwater, there's no more dramatic heaving and buckling to the sides as you move quickly underwater, and the effect is a little more pronounced than before. You'll need to see it moving to get the full idea of what I mean, but just be assured for now that it's hugely improved without being flashy or ostentatious.

It also scales properly for all of the different variable factors too, as you'll be able to see from the above screenshot.

The next thing I'm going to do is handle some of the other view blends using the same setup. One particular speedup I had discovered before was using a smaller sized rendertarget for bonus flashes. The theory is that the bonus flash is only on screen for a fraction of a second and obscures the view somewhat, so the loss of a small bit of detail for that time is completely unnoticeable.

OK, so it's cheating, but it's also a way to tackle one of the major slowdowns inherited from GLQuake. Plus I have this render to texture framework looking mighty clean now, so I may as well use it rather than have it lying idle but using up video RAM during the majority of gameplay.

Blogger's new editor blows by the way. I want the old one back. :(

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