Render...ing?!

Librus is huge. It's genuinely the size of the overworld in ES IV. Which is... both cool as heck and incredibly challenging.

I genuinely didn't understand what went into lighting a scene. Which is to say, you would THINK you were just dropping lights, and those lights would render. And that is 100% an option. But then you end up with the CDP Red issue where your game is... what is the word... unoptimized doom. 

THE REALITY

3D object have textures which are a size. They have geometry which light can hit, and which casts shadows. They have a light map setting which is what the light hitting them casts on other objects. All this has a resolution. The bigger the scene, the more of these there are. My other scenes to this point had... about 500 objects to render. This scene has 5000. And the scale was enormous. 

Unity, in 2020, lost their contract with a Vendor who produced their native solution called Enlighten. Which did all the lifting of calculating how these things go together. They replaced it with a CPU and Experimental GPU feature to do the work instead. And they... don't work on big scenes. I spend 3 day stretches trying to get the lights to calculate and it just... didn't work.

Thankfully, there are third party tools to help with that, and I own a couple of them. But I had never used them before.

WHAT I LEARNED

First, you can carve up terrain, using the Holes Tool. This allows you hide terrain map pieces you don't want or need to render.

I learned about terrain density and resolution as well. The difference are not small. Being able to create the right density on a terrain effects the lighting and the rendering of textures, as well as how many pixels you have to smooth and angle while sculpting the clay.

WHAT'S NEXT

We're past the 50% mark for the creation of the core worlds in the game. Which means we're moving onto creating the Pacifica again. (We had a version of our Good Natured Pirate Hideout in 03s.09, but it was lost when the terrain system blew up during an experiment and took the Development machine with it). 

After about 70 hours I'm excited to be moving onto the next zone. I want to be in the content creation phase. (We've chosen both our Crowd AI and Combat AI solution and I'm super excited to get them up and running. And to being filling the world with NPCs.

STAY TUNED

We've got a tour of Librus coming as soon as I've got the lighting exported and working in a build for the testers.