Our Apartment v0.10.0a Released! - New Cum/Precum/Other VFX - Gropes impact sex sim - New visual upgrades - Various internal polsh Keep an eye out for a new public demo soon!

I've seen some posts "why do games have a million shader variants?" You wanna know why? Dogshit raster tech everyones fast running away from. One thing to know about variants is like it seems it's constantly doubling? Every toggle can potentially split the material into two, and it's a chain of that happening. Split, split, split, split, split, split until you have a million. See when it comes to RT/PT, you want more performance? Turn off some rays, lower some samples, maybe use a different denoiser. It's not (at least to my knowledge) a bunch of different shit. You know what raster is like when you want to have actual graphics settings that scale? You need to toggle/adjust like minimum 3 different things for GI: - Main GI: Probes, Lightmap, whatever has various settings and filtering that can add variants - SSGI: To make up for the baked stuff can have various modes and settings - SSAO: cause SSGI probably isn't good enough to handle small details or the performance would too bad. It has it's own different modes and quality and potential shader integrations (SSAO should mask reflections) That's just the start now you get the real nitty gritty bullshit. Shadows... A lot of games have dogshit basic shadowmaps, I've struggled with why but I'm starting to think it's variants. So say a game has good shadows and wants to scale. For good shadows it's like 4 things. - Most games have shadow filtering to make them not look pixelated, different shadow filtering can add variants - If a game has PCSS shadows like it should thats often a toggle for performance with different filtering modes - Shadow maps suck and don't work for small details, so you need contact shadows which also suck and add another variant - Thats just for sun light, some games have additional stuff for point and spot lights, or area lights maybe. Maybe you want to turn off shadows for those (they're very heavy) thats a toggle. THEN you get to reflections, same issue like 4 different things. - Reflection probes suck, you'd think they wouldn't have modes but they have at minimum 2. Sphere mode and Box mode. Could be more for fancier implementations. - Planar reflections suck, they're extremely performance heavy so you have to add a bunch of variants for the low quality rendering you need to run them at all. Then god help you if you want ANY additional effects on top of those planar reflections. - SSR sucks, you probably have a WIDE range of settings for that for different quality levels. Different filtering, etc. - And then there's like all the weird shit games do to fake reflections thats also complex and probably adds variants. Split, split, split, split on like every shader just to scale this bullshit. If we just scrapped low-quality settings this wouldn't be an issue since you don't need variants for turning stuff off. You know what would really simplify this? Upscaling, fuck lower quality settings just upscale the fucking shit, less variants, less potentiall stutter, less B̸U̸I̸L̸D̸ T̸I̸M̸E̸. And then all this happens before like all the cool shit like particle effects and other cool things that aren't just making basic lighting work and not look like shit. And extra shit you do for skin and hair and etc etc etc etc that causes all this to STACK EVEN MORE. And if your response to this is "Well don't do that" well yeah cool that's raytracing/PT. This is not a "Realistic" games issue this is a every game issue. And when you think a game looks bad it's probably not doing a lot of these things. ESPECIALLY if you want characters to look good, you know what doesn't work with raster and baked shit? The thing that's moving around every fucking frame! So you need a million extra bullshit to make it look decent in different scenarios. AND DOING THESE THINGS IS WHY EVERY FUCKING TIME I WANT TO DELIVER A BUILD I GOTTA FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP THE GODDAMNED BUILD TAKING 24+ FUCKING HOURS. DEVS DON'T LIKE HAVING ALL THESE VARIANTS EITHER! Part of it is my fault, it's a bit of tech debt (I got some shaders that are too similar which is probably a · bˣ the variants), I'm working on it BUT GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. You could have one goddamned toggle in a fucking hay stack that's causing a variant explosion. The engine does it's best to try to make sure every variant the game needs is included and no more and often it can suck at doing that. I pray for a full RT/PT future where shit just works. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Damn shit is moving fast, its like the workflow is changing every week. I can barely keep up with what other devs are doing. 😩 Even if they describe it its a bit beyond me. I'd have to experiment more but I don't have the time. I just wanna be done.

This tool is a godsend, turned a 24 hr build into a 2 hr one... Apparently there's a mild performance cost to dynamic branch so we'll see...