Dev Blog
Hi, this is the Stranded III development blog (see also Forum Thread, Comment Thread).
Entry 43 - Shrooms & Fern - May 22, 2016
Multithreading
After attending the 2. Hamburg Unity User Group and hearing Arne Held's talk about multithreading in Unity I decided to optimize my map generation with multithreading.
For the moment I only touched the Delaunay polygon scanline filling code which currently is the slowest part (it's not very optimized) of the algorithm. Unfortunately filling multiple polygons at once using concurrent threads doesn't give me the expected speed boost. Even worse: It actually becomes slower. Maybe due to per-thread memory allocations or whatever. I measured the time for the thread creation itself but it's negligible in my case. I'm still trying to find out why it becomes slower instead of faster.
Anyway: It's a very interesting topic as most people have CPUs which benefit from multithreading*. I'll use multithreading for sure for other things in Stranded III. Like processing network packages or calculating AI stuff.
*) Here are some stats regarding this:
Unity hardware stats (May 2016)
Steam hard- and software survey (last 5 months)
Mushrooms!
Here's a delicious Chanterelle:
click to enlarge
And here's a less delicious, because toxic, candidate: Pholiotina Rugosa.
click to enlarge
Fern.
I love fern. It totally has to be in Stranded III. The problem when making fern is, that fern leafs are very detailed. I wanted to get these details right so I took the shape of a real fern leaf (Google image search) and painted over it.
It's not finished yet because it takes a lot of time to draw all the details but this is what I got so far:
click to enlarge
Normally I make the model first, generate the UVs and then draw the texture. For the fern I had the texture first. To make a model from this existing texture I mapped it on a quad and used Blender's knife tool (one of my favorites!) to cut out the leaf shape. This way I was able to get a mesh which perfectly fits the UV texture without ugly stretching and without much overdrawing.
After attending the 2. Hamburg Unity User Group and hearing Arne Held's talk about multithreading in Unity I decided to optimize my map generation with multithreading.
For the moment I only touched the Delaunay polygon scanline filling code which currently is the slowest part (it's not very optimized) of the algorithm. Unfortunately filling multiple polygons at once using concurrent threads doesn't give me the expected speed boost. Even worse: It actually becomes slower. Maybe due to per-thread memory allocations or whatever. I measured the time for the thread creation itself but it's negligible in my case. I'm still trying to find out why it becomes slower instead of faster.
Anyway: It's a very interesting topic as most people have CPUs which benefit from multithreading*. I'll use multithreading for sure for other things in Stranded III. Like processing network packages or calculating AI stuff.
*) Here are some stats regarding this:
Unity hardware stats (May 2016) Steam hard- and software survey (last 5 months)Mushrooms!
Here's a delicious Chanterelle:
click to enlargeAnd here's a less delicious, because toxic, candidate: Pholiotina Rugosa.
click to enlargeFern.
I love fern. It totally has to be in Stranded III. The problem when making fern is, that fern leafs are very detailed. I wanted to get these details right so I took the shape of a real fern leaf (Google image search) and painted over it.
It's not finished yet because it takes a lot of time to draw all the details but this is what I got so far:
click to enlargeNormally I make the model first, generate the UVs and then draw the texture. For the fern I had the texture first. To make a model from this existing texture I mapped it on a quad and used Blender's knife tool (one of my favorites!) to cut out the leaf shape. This way I was able to get a mesh which perfectly fits the UV texture without ugly stretching and without much overdrawing.