Update #5 (Level 2 procedural generation) (Patreon)

Procedural Generation!

Highlights:

Cleaned up and polished the main generation framework. (Much more efficient)

Added a couple more hallway variations.

Dynamic lighting quality system implemented that increases lighting quality closer to you and turns down settings further away that aren't noticable. (Performance boost)

Coming Up:

• Level 931 building start and possible
livestream🤨

• New level poll for the next alpha level up for testing

The Details (for nerds):

The main focus (and biggest time eater) has been the dynamic lighting quality system. Lumen does automatically come with some optimization for light sources that are far away and but still in sight, which Level 2 has alot of with mostly all straight hallways, but with 10+ rect lights and alot of geo around it still gets pretty expensive. So to try to get around this we decided to look into Lumens light source settings a bit deeper to try to find settings that only matter when looked at up close. After a bit of testing we found a few GI settings that were able to be turned down a couple meters away with no visible affect and completely turned off further away with no affect as well. A pretty simple distance function was created then that gets every light source every couple of seconds. It then checks if each source is visible and if it isn't applies the lowest settings to it. If it is visible it then takes the distance to the player and categorizes it as close, far, or very far away. Close sources get the highest (reasonable) settings applied, far sources get stepped down GI settings, and very far sources get their GI completely turned off. After a couple distance changes and tweaking, the system is now up and running and saves on average around 10 - 12 fps! (Huge)