Phew - I just uploaded a 3.2GB version of the game for some people to check out ;-) Hopefully that will go well.

I just added a ton of stuff into the game ... everything about the aerial dropships has been coded since the last update. I had to code a blurred rotor rendering system that would play nicely with the shield transparency. I guess the solution was to render the blurred rotors 2X - once before rendering the shield, and once after. This is the only way I'm able to get their transparencies to look correct in all situations. I'll post a test case of this situation later. The blurred rotors look waaay better than regular geometry did ;-)

I designed the dropship rendering system to support 64 dropships at once. The high LOD model is 11,000+ triangles, the far LOD is 720 triangles. Each dropship is uniquely animated...the landing gear, flaps, door, rotors, etc. This pretty much put instancing out of the question :-/ Still performance is acceptable IMO.

Some other things I worked on include adding a shield sound for when the caemra enters/exits the base, footstep sounds, obviously the dropship rendering system, the dropship AI, dropship dust clouds, dropship 3D rotor sounds, various HUD items, etc.

Another point of focus was optimization of the grass rendering system [ moving from shader instancing to hardware instancing ]. I still think the system is pixel-shader fill-rate limited especially at high resolutions in dense grass fields. I render them using hardware geometry instancing with vertex texture fetch against a heightfield to align the grass perfectly to the terrain.

Well I'm supr tired so ... screenshot time ;-)

These are resized from 1680x1050 screen grabs of the 3.15.2010 build...

Dropship on the Beach Assault map...


Dropship on the Grassland shield defense map...


Grassland shield defense map...


Testing soldier worst-case scenario...256 soldiers grouped together...


Testing dropship worst-case scenario...32 dropships inside the shield. Note how the blurred rotors work correctly with the shield transparency, as described above.


Alright guys, until next time...

- Dan