Northern Ireland Nature

My game Hexyle is progressing nicely. I’ve just nailed the 3d rendering system, which creates a procedurally generated world out of hexagonal tiles.

The images from my previous post were just throw togethers to explore the general aesthetic of using hexagonal building blocks to create random scenery – there was no consideration for frame rate or optimisation – it would have been impossible to play at the 10 fps or so it was allowing me. So I had to rebuild an optimised game engine from scratch using some innovative techniques to achieve maximum visual impact and fast frame rate.

Asides from the usual considerations of open gl optimisations such as pre baked lighting, streamlined meshes etc, I’ve created my own geomipmapping technique using depth buffering.

Geomipmapping is a technique used in 3d games whereby low poly models replace high poly models at far distances, to improve performance without any visual degradation. The trouble with this however is that you have to ‘switch’ over the 2 models at the right time, at the right distance, to avoid ‘popping’ new geometry with suddenly higher/lower polys. This involves having lots of different versions of the same model in memory.

Northern Ireland Nature
Northern Ireland Nature
Northern Ireland Nature
Northern Ireland Nature
Northern Ireland Nature
Northern Ireland Nature