(Beta Branch Only)
I was making good progress having animals run their AI logic on Jobs but it was taking far longer than I was happy with. Bottom line, its just a ton of work to convert every single bit of logic for the animals and to then check/debug each scenario. So I've shelved my progress to return to later and instead focused on insects. I laid enough of a foundation for animal AI that the rendering and animation logic can be applied to fish/insects so I've used insects as a simpler test example and they are now rendering nicely with the new systems and taking far less time to do so. Now that the foundations are laid I'll finally move onto fish for the next update, I just need to be extra careful with them since there are so many and they have the potential to cost a lot of rendering time if not handled properly.
Not getting animals where I wanted was disappointing so I decided to work on clouds a break. The current clouds render pretty quickly for what they are but its another thing in Aiyana that is still taking a bit of time to render because its just a Lot of vertices to process. I've also been torn with the current clouds. Sometimes I look at them and think "yeah these look nice" and other times I look at them and think "they just look like flying brains". So since their rendering time could be improved I decided to try a new direction with them and this is what I've come up with.
Even though its much more detailed, this style uses far less vertices than the old clouds and renders in half the time. Its also able to ramp up nicely with the rain which is something that always bothered me with old clouds is that I couldn't find a way to subtly spawn/unload lots of them when it was about to rain.
I still need to efficiently express their shadows since as you can see in this image its a little off that the sky is so dark yet the trees look bright. They also pop in/out and could do with a fading algorithm so they are on my list for the next update.