{"id":184,"date":"2018-05-15T22:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T03:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/?p=184"},"modified":"2018-05-15T16:17:04","modified_gmt":"2018-05-15T21:17:04","slug":"shadows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/15\/shadows\/","title":{"rendered":"Shadows"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw first-hand today something that I already knew.\u00a0 Shadows are expensive.\u00a0 One of my test machines is an old PC currently running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.\u00a0 It has an Intel\u00ae Core\u21222 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz and 8GB of RAM.\u00a0 Needless to say, this isn’t a powerful machine.\u00a0 The processor scored a\u00a02286 on the Passmark benchmark test<\/a>.\u00a0 By comparison a $1,000 gaming PC you can buy on Newegg right now<\/a> has an\u00a0Intel\u00ae Core\u2122 i7-8700K @ 3.70GHz with a score of\u00a016034.\u00a0 And that’s completely ignoring the graphics card.\u00a0 My point is, if the game will run on this test machine it should run just about anywhere.\u00a0 Without shadows I get 20-25 FPS on a 1920×1080 monitor.\u00a0 If I knock that down to 1024×768 I get about 40 FPS.\u00a0 If I turn on shadows, however, my FPS at 1920×1080 is around 5.\u00a0 5 FPS!\u00a0 If I size the window to 1024×768 it shoots up to about 12.\u00a0 This is why I want to build the game from the ground up to be as configurable as possible by the players.\u00a0 If you want fancy effects and have a fast computer, go for it.\u00a0 If your machine is kind of old and you don’t care so much about the visuals, turn them off.\u00a0 If you have a clunker but want to see all the cool effects and don’t mind a horrible frame rate, jump right in!<\/p>\n

This will take some effort throughout development but I think it’s worth it to give players some control over their own experience rather than dictating a certain set of hardware requirements to enjoy the game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw first-hand today something that I already knew.\u00a0 Shadows are expensive.\u00a0 One of my test machines is an old PC currently running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.\u00a0 It has an Intel\u00ae Core\u21222 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz and 8GB of RAM.\u00a0 Needless to say, this isn’t a powerful machine.\u00a0 The processor scored a\u00a02286 on the Passmark…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-planning-and-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chroniclesoftright.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}