Looking good

I badly need a fucking working ati driver...

Yes! There are some seriously cool things worth talking about, for example a few changes we introduced this week that cut branch miss predictions in half and also lowered the total amount of retired branches, allowing for more CPU cycles to be available to the game.

Stuff like this in general is really interesting, because usually you are discouraged from doing micro-optimizations, but in our case there are some seriously optimized classes already which only profit from micro optimizations anymore. And thanks to the PMC in Intel CPUs it's now possible to profile for these low level events. Really cool and not something you usually see.

Also, the whole tessellation system now and the dynamic shader system in general, really cool technical things and easy to use, but incredibly powerful.

tl;dr: We do have a lot of technical stuff to talk about, but want to keep the update blog posts relevant to what we did and what we are currently being busy with. So last week that was documentation. This week it's documentation. And next week world domination... Or something like that anyways


Hell yes you do!

Software engineering related question incoming, I suppose you implemented the visitor pattern in a way such that none of your node subclasses actually performs calls to opengl, but instead the renderer just calls the appropriate method to render a node if it should be rendered, and is the only class making actual opengl calls?

Yes, and no. The scene nodes don't render themselves but tell the renderer what to do, so far, so "yes". "No", because the renderer isn't the only thing that does OpenGL calls. The light manager for example makes them too, which granted, you can think of an extension to the renderer itself. But the texture classes, the shader class, the shader cache... All these classes make the OpenGL calls themselves, mainly because the renderer does exactly what its name suggests: Rendering.


Anyways, it's Saturday... And for some reason people associate that with screenshots. So we figured, why not? Right? Right!

Ah, I see.

Real talk, these last shots and the tesselation-shots simply cry out for a nice video with the camera flying around through this scene.

It looks so pretty!

It is so PRETTY, yes.

Yeah? Then why don't you ask as if you can get alpha access?! Because you can... If you'd ask us


Well, yes, but it's screenshot saturday, not video monday... Jeez, some people here.
There will be a video though... Don't you worry child