These look great and they had just the right style for my game!
Unfortunately, I found the shader to be very unoptimized. If you have ~100 cliffs in your level it will probably start to lag. After doing some testing, I found that the fragment shader was the source of the lag. It wasn't due to the positioning of my cliffs causing a ton of overdraw or not having occlusion culling or something like that.
The shader has ~26 (I counted. It's around there.) conditional operations per pixel and is simply very big. I understand that the conditionals are for certain settings but I recommend hard-coding them for optimization. I am also on a very good PC so I can only imagine how this would affect more mid-range target hardware. This is fine if you are trying to make a very detailed scene but I ended up having to make an optimized / modified version that only has one texture since that was all I needed. I was lucky I only needed one texture and not the secondary top texture because if not my game's performance would have suffered a lot.
Overall I think this is a very good asset as it worked really well in my game once I got everything figured out and it looks fantastic. Basically, I think it's worth it since they look great but you'll probably need to optimize the shader for your use case if you plan to use them at scale. Great job! I can tell a lot of work went into this.
Hi, Thanks so much for the kind words. Sorry if you were seeing performance issues. I had heard similar feedback from a developer trying to use them on Android devices.
I'll see if I can spend some time doing some performance improvements and do an update, maybe simply use the shader preprocessor for some of the options instead.
Edit: as far as I know, any conditionals that are based on a consistent setting such a bool uniform, should not cause any issues as the condition will always be the same, so it won't generate branching as all threads will follow the same execution path.
These look gorgeous! Two quick questions: 1) Can these be used in other engines? (I don't mind building new materials/shaders from scratch) 2) Can the asset be shared amongst a team for the exclusive purpose of contributing to a company project?
Thanks. Yes to both questions. There are no engine restrictions, but yeah you would need to do some setup in other engines. And yes the idea with the license was to make it permissive and easy to use, no issue with having other people use the assets on the project you bought them for, they just shouldn't then take the assets and use them elsewhere without buying a copy.
The assets themselves will not be open sourced, so if the project, including it's assets are open source, these assets could not be included. But if a project has it's code open source but it's art is not, which I believe is sometimes the case, then it would be fine to use these assets. So any one person who contributes to that project can buy the assets and put them in there.
My intention with the license was that if you buy the assets you can use them for absolutely whatever you want as long as you aren't selling or giving the assets themselves away to be used by other people in their own projects, who have not bought them.
I hope that makes sense and answers your question. I'll try and update the text with more specifics when I update the asset.
Your asset pack is already really, really cool, but with the material maker files included it will be the cherry on the cake! (did I say your pack is really cool ?)
Thanks :). Yeah I should have thought of that. I'll do an update to the files next week, unfortunately I'm travelling for the next few days. I'll also include a .blend file with the models in case anyone wants to do their level building in Blender.
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These look great and they had just the right style for my game!
Unfortunately, I found the shader to be very unoptimized. If you have ~100 cliffs in your level it will probably start to lag. After doing some testing, I found that the fragment shader was the source of the lag. It wasn't due to the positioning of my cliffs causing a ton of overdraw or not having occlusion culling or something like that.
The shader has ~26 (I counted. It's around there.) conditional operations per pixel and is simply very big. I understand that the conditionals are for certain settings but I recommend hard-coding them for optimization. I am also on a very good PC so I can only imagine how this would affect more mid-range target hardware. This is fine if you are trying to make a very detailed scene but I ended up having to make an optimized / modified version that only has one texture since that was all I needed. I was lucky I only needed one texture and not the secondary top texture because if not my game's performance would have suffered a lot.
Overall I think this is a very good asset as it worked really well in my game once I got everything figured out and it looks fantastic. Basically, I think it's worth it since they look great but you'll probably need to optimize the shader for your use case if you plan to use them at scale. Great job! I can tell a lot of work went into this.
Hi, Thanks so much for the kind words. Sorry if you were seeing performance issues. I had heard similar feedback from a developer trying to use them on Android devices.
I'll see if I can spend some time doing some performance improvements and do an update, maybe simply use the shader preprocessor for some of the options instead.
Edit: as far as I know, any conditionals that are based on a consistent setting such a bool uniform, should not cause any issues as the condition will always be the same, so it won't generate branching as all threads will follow the same execution path.
These look gorgeous! Two quick questions:
1) Can these be used in other engines? (I don't mind building new materials/shaders from scratch)
2) Can the asset be shared amongst a team for the exclusive purpose of contributing to a company project?
Hiya Junuh,
Thanks. Yes to both questions. There are no engine restrictions, but yeah you would need to do some setup in other engines. And yes the idea with the license was to make it permissive and easy to use, no issue with having other people use the assets on the project you bought them for, they just shouldn't then take the assets and use them elsewhere without buying a copy.
Awesome, sounds good!
Reading the license it wasn't clear to me whether the assets can be used in an open source project. Could you clarify that?
The assets themselves will not be open sourced, so if the project, including it's assets are open source, these assets could not be included. But if a project has it's code open source but it's art is not, which I believe is sometimes the case, then it would be fine to use these assets. So any one person who contributes to that project can buy the assets and put them in there.
My intention with the license was that if you buy the assets you can use them for absolutely whatever you want as long as you aren't selling or giving the assets themselves away to be used by other people in their own projects, who have not bought them.
I hope that makes sense and answers your question. I'll try and update the text with more specifics when I update the asset.
Thanks for taking the time to answer this!
Your asset pack is already really, really cool, but with the material maker files included it will be the cherry on the cake! (did I say your pack is really cool ?)
love it, great job
Thanks :). Yeah I should have thought of that. I'll do an update to the files next week, unfortunately I'm travelling for the next few days.
I'll also include a .blend file with the models in case anyone wants to do their level building in Blender.
That's just perfect !! Thanks ! Have a good trip ! :)
Updated the asset now with the source files included :)
You rock ! Thank you !! :)
Are the Material Maker presets for the textures included?
Looks like a great asset pack in any case!
They are not, but good point! I'll update the files to include them.
New release with the Material Maker files included is now released :)