Performance is nearly the same, but I've experienced something strange. I think once I've zoomed close to the ground, my FPS will be divided by two for the rest of the game. it may be related to the new particles... maybe not :/ I'll try to play some more and see when it gets slower...
I found that removing all the mods fixed the problem for me. I had several mods installed when this was occurring. It may only be one of those mods that was causing the problem, but I have not yet been able to determine which one, as I have not re-installed any of them yet.
Aye, Performance has gotten better for me in this build. After removing the mods I had installed at least.
There are two big performance optimizations eventually coming for the rendering side, instancing lights and instancing units. If you're wondering what kind of improvements these can make ask anyone who played the game when we first added planet features (trees, rocks, small things on the surface of the planets) to the game. A tropical planet could easily bring any computer to a crawl, we fluctuated between disabling them all together and some heavy handed visibility checks to turn off sections of them. We now render several tens of thousands of trees, rocks, and metal bits on the planets at all times with a very minor performance impact (for most hardware at least). We also did add an LOD system for features to change them from their full poly representation to simple a cross section rendering, but we're still rendering a huge number of them. For lights we're using a deferred rendering path which lets us render a huge number of lights far more efficiently than a forward render, but we're still rendering each light individually. Instancing will speed up the rendering of them somewhat, as will packing lights together to render multiple lights each "draw" which should make rendering them even faster. I also want to implement an LOD system to fade smaller lights out at a distance to reduce the number further. For units all the art assets and underlying rendering setup for them has been designed with eventually instancing them, but it is a more complex bit of work to instance units as by their nature they're more complex than a rock or light. We're also currently far more limited by the cpu when it comes to unit count than the rendering side, so we obviously have work to do there.
Lights look really cool when you are viewing the dark side of a distant planet. What if instead of just fading them out, you combine all of the lights on the planet into some kind of light intensity map when the camera gets far enough away. 1000 tanks with their headlights on would still produce light, but the source of the light would just be the center of the army instead of 1000 individual light points.
Light directionality is an important factor in how much coverage a particular light has. It's a much more complex issue to solve than simply take x number of lights with overlapping radii and glom them together into a single light. The resulting visible lighting will be surprisingly different than the original. Besides process for creating a heat map of light intensities is essentially the same as just rendering them to begin with, so we're not saving any performance doing that.
