Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Winter is returning and I'm back again.

Yet again the summer months have been a slack time for Decade. As a solo hobby project I find it very difficult to sit at my PC after a long day in the office when the sun is shining outside. Now that the cold, wet and dark nights are back I feel the urge to return to Decade and complete some of my long standing wishlist features.

Over the past week or two I've been researching shaders. I have decided to add support for CG and CGFX to Decade. My first task with this will be to move the procedural texture generation to the GPU. This should hopefully vastly speed up this area of the engine allowing much smoother planet generation.

Having reviewed the Decade code with a fresh mind, some housekeeping is first required. Cleaning up interfaces and improving segments before building upon. Within the next week I hope to have some comparisons between generating the textures on the CPU and the GPU. Not having much experience using the GPU for this type of processing I am unsure what to expect but from reading other blogs regarding Planet and Terrain generation I am confident that it is the right approach to take.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting! I just discovered your blog. I can't wait to see what you'll come up with.

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