Changing the Scenario Atmosphere with Look Presets! - Infinite Realms Developer VLog

Hello and welcome to Infinite Realms, this is the Developer VLog - version 2022.0.4!

What have we got? A new Look Preset interface, an FPS counter, a new rendering system and a lot more improvements under the hood!

The most prominent feature of the new Infinite Realms version is the Look Preset Window! In previous releases we had two simple dropdown menus. One for the Look Category and one to directly apply the Look Preset to the Effects System. This was a quick and kinda „okay“ solution when I first implemented it more than a year ago. But the categories and file names alone in most cases were not very meaningful.

This is why we designed the new Look Preset selection from the ground up and gave it its own dedicated window. Each Preset now has some metadata such as a preview screenshot, a more or less meaningful name and a description. The whole team contributed to this project! So many thanks to you, I would have gone crazy writing all these descriptions myself!

The preview screenshot is rendered in a special old/new comparison style you may have seen on some web pages, comparing the selected style to a vanilla screenshot without any Preset.
Also there is a search function now that looks for your keywords in Preset names and descriptions to filter results shown in addition to the category dropdown.

In case you do not have Infinite Realms early access and want it: Write a mail to Nina - nina@megavoid.de. We do not have an automated payment system yet, but she can work something out with you real quick!

The Look Preset feature was on our roadmap and relatively easy to implement, so what did us take so long to get the new version out of the door?

I completely rewrote and expanded the rendering system to three cameras! The main Camera now renders the 3d Scene and saves the result in a virtual texture or „image“. This texture is then passed to a game master and a player camera where additional stuff like user interface and fog of war are rendered on top!

There is a completely new option in the settings as well: you can now activate a frame counter to measure Infinite Realms performance! When active it will only show up in running Scenarios and only in case the mouse is moved or the bottom menu is open! The more the better, but the absolute minimum for a smooth experience is 24 fps, the cinematic frame rate!

What else? We updated the Fog of War tools to be a bit more precise, but due to the fog’s volumetric nature it is just not possible to be pixel-perfect. What is also bugging us is the fact that very bright scenes can shine through the fog a bit. This is why I decided to dump this third party plugin and started writing our own Fog of War system from scratch that will be part of the next Infinite Realms release!
Apart from being completely opaque it will have significantly improved performance and new tools! I added square and hex shaped brushes to the new system as well as a way to add fog brushes with configurable shapes and radius to our token system! This way you will be able to clear Fog of War by simply moving tokens with activated fog brushes around!

And the last thing that dragged out our planned release was the cloud download system again… You may remember my rant in the last developer vlog where I talked about implementing a custom download manager.
It may not have to come to this - when we updated the content catalog for this version we realized that a lot of the problems came from two sources: An unreliable function we used to preload content and the local cache.

We were able to mitigate a lot of the negative effects by implementing a few more timeout counters, cache cleanup functions and scrapping the old preload system. You should now get a smooth experience and even if a problem shows up - no more freezes in loading screens!