Graphics Update, V1.2

Is the assumption correct that the tradeof is much smaller when it comes to e.g. a box because storing 8 vertices with each 3 coordinates needs 24 floats (or whatever datatype used) and for two matrices usually 32 floats?
Sure this is only valid for such simple geometry and thus still very much an improvement for more complex light geometry.

Also i was wondering if you guys use one shadowmap for each planet, do you need some form of cascading or is the resolution of the shadowmap high enough not to show steps on the shadow borders?

Thanks guys, you're giving me (and everyone else) a huge inside on the stuff under the hood!!

Just for the record, you can store the information for a box's dimensions, position and rotation in a single 4x4 matrix. Using vertices for that is impractical. Chances are they're using the second matrix for something else.
EDIT: (Actually, you could probably just use a 3x3 matrix)

Yeah, they probably store light attributes like color in the second matrix. still the difference wouldnt be that great and i was just wondering if i think of it the correct way

I'd be really interested in hearing some of your thoughts on the challenges relating to this as I've heard that multi-threading a rendering engine is technically quite a difficult thing to do...? I'm actually surprised by how much you guys are achieving with a single thread at the moment so with an updated multi-threaded engine the game should fly (my rather dated laptop is currently holding up to PA pretty well, not bad for a 4 year old first gen i5 laptop chip. Edit, or rather not bad going you guys for getting the game running well on it.).

Thanks for posting that. It's always fun to read about the technical side of PA. I can't wait to see these changes in action!

cannot wait for this, performance improvement should be HUGE when this comes around

Well the multi-thread engine wont

I wouldnt overrate this, i mean after all its still mostly the GPU which limits the rendering performance. Sure multicores are great for doing AI / physics etc computations but (and correct me if im wrong) having multiple threads for rendering is usually not such a vast improvement (since you still have to shove stuff on the gpu and the bandwith is also a limiting factor)

I have never had 100% gpu usage with this game, my cpu has always been the limiting factor, when this goes multicore I expect a big perf improvement

also how much work does making PA multicore compatible entail?

Glorious! Very cool.

Does Picture in Picture still double the amount of things being rendered on the screen or have you managed to find some work arounds for this as well?

it is good to heard, i can t wait to play with more fps.
I do not often thanks the devs, they are working and be paid for their game after all. (no thanks to me when I finished building a nice wall, it is my job...)
but "Merci et bon courage pour la gamma !"

Is there a particular reason you chose OpenGL over DirectX?

Cross platform support.

i didnt really follow the start of the project all that much...
was that one of the parts they advertised in the kickstarter campaign?

The game has to run on Windows, Linux and OS X.

The naive downsampling is done on the GPU with a single pass shader that does the downsampling and the luminance conversion in one pass and not needing any more memory beyond the existing input buffer and scaled down output buffer.
Generating a full mipmap chain on a large, non power of two texture might be faster on its own than the shader we're using, but then we'd still have to run the shader to convert it from color to luminance and we waste a good bit of memory on mipmap levels we never need. Internally the mipmap generation process is going to be nearly identical to what we're already doing, so it is unlikely we'd get any performance back.