The terrain code + demos are available here: patreon.com/vercidium If you have any technical / game engine questions, ask them here!

As someone wise said once upon a time, "The real programming starts when you run out of memory".

Didn't realize how deep you can get with optimizing your environments, I've always kept a consistent LOD with my environments without realizing how much memory i was wasting. Thanks for the video it was very informative!

optimization enables the potential of modern tech, if we optimize badly it's like optimizing well on worse tech. So this is really damn important.

As an alternative to pitch/yaw for compressing normals, you can also use GL_INT_2_10_10_10_REV which also lets you store the 3 vector components in 4 bytes at a lower precision.

This is some incredible production value. Very nice visuals to go alongside your explanations!

I feel like there should be a definitive list of optimizations devs should just go through whenever making games, I've seen some really bad optimized games from AAA devs and I wonder how it's so bad sometimes.

As an artist who doesn't know code.....I had no idea you could reduce the data on terrain like that! Always amazes me what can be done when you reeeaallly know how to manipulate the 1's and 0's

I am not a game developer, but a video game enthusiast. Never dived behind the scenes like this and it's beautiful seeing you explain everything on how to optimize and make something run quicker. That, and the presentation and music choise were top notch! Thanks for this entertaining video!

THE NON-ANIMATED ANIMATIONS ❤

Also, culling triangles and using sprites can help a lot. Shamus Young has a project where he could generate the texture for the terrain at full detail, then cull triangles, then when rendered, looks full detail but runs way faster. OLC demonstrates that relying on sprites, even transforming them all, can be blazingly fast with insane numbers of sprites.

I just finished my bachelors in game development this september, and I have been really losing interest in coding etc.. But watching this video reminded me of how cool i used to think it was, and I actually feel extremely motivated to get back to it, Its insane what you were able to accomplish and I cannot wait for more on this. Please keep posting blogs on this topic or anything related to it !!! I genuinely feel like I've had my eyes reopened to coding. Despite not being the best at coding nor remembering how to do things properly, I can't wait to see more and get back into the swing of things!

I was astonished by the performance of Sector's edge on laptop integrated graphics Also, I've never seen such short loading times on an HDD, kinda reminiscent of old Source Games/Battlefield/Early Minecraft where It's basically just click and play Hope this gets the recognition it deserves some day

These dev videos are really high quality and interesting to watch.

The visuals are INSANE! You really put a lot of effort into it! Good Job!

"It's likely every game you've played is just a bunch of triangles moving around." Minecraft: Triangle? What's that?

The first optimization technique has one drawback: GPUs calculate texture mip mapping levels by screen space partial derivatives. That means: There will be visible seams for fragments where the UVs wrap (i.e. where a u or v component suddenly changes from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1). Ben Golus has a very good article about that issue titled "Distinctive Derivative Differences".

wait.. it's all... triangles?

Great video! Definitely gonna start writing my 12 friends' ice cream orders on a piece of paper and passing it to the ice cream guy now 😂 My only comment would be it was harder to see the difference between the levels of detail of terrain than in previous example clips you've posted for some reason.

Insanely high quality and easy to digest, this video made me subscribe. I don't code to this level but love to see optimizations done. Well done!

I recently got you recommended to me and am I happy that it happened. I love learning about optimization!!! Keep up the great work!

Wow those animations are clean. Nice stuff, this is very high quality and interesting!

This is really clever! Looking forward to seeing more.

I was glued in for the whole video. Excellently done!

This is absolutely fascinating stuff. I'll have to watch it a few times to grasp all of it, but brilliant work, mate. Some extremely clever solutions here.

I am so happy I clicked on this video Awesome, high quality and thoughtful content. 100% subscribing, thank you!

Amazing Video! Nice Animations and super clear explanation. Keep up the good work!

Incredible job explaining and visualising these concepts. Thanks so much for sharing!

Highly informative and extremely well edited video! Massive kudos.

I know nothing about game developing nor do I have any plans to do game developing but this was still very entertaining and educational to watch because optimization just feels good :D It's sad to see that computing power has grown so much but we're not taking full advantage of it in games because so much is spent on skipping the optimization that was previously obligatory to make any game run well.

I don't do any development but your graphics are super clean and intuitive and get your point across perfectly. Your production value is genuinely good enough for a channel a thousand times the size.

Great video. You ver thoroughly explained the steps required to optimize a game. I'm currently working on my own one, and this video will certainly come in handy, once I'll be optimizing it.

Amazing video and really good choice of background music! - It fits the theme of the video so good!

High quality videos! Thanks for your effort

The video editing is so crisp and on point.

Didn't know about the sinking terrain trick! Nice one. It seems much easier than having to stitch vertices together where the LOD changes (as in only render LOD 1 outside of LOD 0's area).

Instantly subscribed. Looking forward to see what you’ll release next!

Yes, a well optimized game gives me instant appretiation for it. Especially nowadays where slightly different shadows and reflections (ray tracing) are somehow seen as some huge graphical improvement that is worth leaving a huge amount of players behind for (they don't have the latest, most expensive cards). Also, unfinished games.

Damn! That was an insane amount of quality in both the visuals AND explanation!

Thanks so much for the demonstration, this makes LOD and batching really easy to understand!

The visuals alone were an instant subscribe for me. The great explanations confirmed it was the right choice! Looking forward to more videos like this

I am now a proud subcriber. You crammed so much technical detail into a short and simple explianation that was easy to understgand as a noobie

I had 1 time where I collaborated with my friend on a game development for our college project. Bro's a genius at programming since highschool, I knew a bit of game dev and how the basic works but I mostly works as designer and making sprites, fixing animations and enhancing models he made before. He said that in game development, programming was never the hard part of it, optimization is. Apparently making games nowadays have gotten so easy with all these popular game engine like unity or UE, so game dev is 20% programming, 40% graphic design and 40% optimization. That's why you have to get everything organized properly, as efficient as possible. "If you can't optimize your game, it's already a failed project, so it's better to start a new and fix everything"

That is absolutely crazy and so cool to see. Thanks for sharing

Superb video - excellent presentation and really effective memory management, thanks for sharing!

I don’t do game dev (sadly), just programming. A lot of this was very interesting to see, especially how you grouped your triangles!

if only devs could watch youtube videos...

I think it is important to state in the beginning that all of this is valid only in context of static geometry (i.e. landscapes). For moving meshes, you cannot just use polar coordinates with integer degrees, as it would make many modifications of vertice positions (Affine matrixes, quaternions etc) more complicated, and limit the overall transformations. Radians cannot be represented in integers, and any trigonometric function accepts radians in computations - at very least, it would severely degrade precision if radians are shrinked to only 16-bits (1 degree in radians is 0.0174 - so you need at least 4 digital positions to describe 1/360 of full rotation). Also, triangle stripts are noticeably better than unindexed triangle lists - but only marginally better than indexed triangle lists. So if we talk about something which is not landscape meshes (where strips would have most advantages - for big uninterrupted convex non-selfintersecting meshes, without backface rendering), there can be more optimal choises depending on situation. Also, very important to mention that these are, I assume, based on general OpenGL API. So if using DirectX API it can be very different, i.e. having more internal optimizations, or shader conveyer being implemented differently, vertex shaders having some buffer-related differences, etc etc. And most importantly (especially for non-professional viewers) - specify what "memory" is refered in those calculations. I figured out it is about specifically RAM (kilobytes for vertices etc) only at the halfway point of the video - it was not explicitly stated anywhere before.

I'm glad this found its way to my recommended. Great video!

Omg this is such a good video, im loving it, tysm for making these

that was awesome, cant believe you got to render 16000 times more terrain with 5x more fps than at the start

That's an insanely well-edited video. Great job!

Fascinating approach. I might use it some day.

You're a genius, not just because you figured this out, but the way you presented it as well

Awesome video btw. I recently started my own little gamedev journey. Found this very enlightening from a programmer's stand point. Looking forward to your current and future content!

Great video :) Saving it to my game dev playlist so I can rewatch it later. I'm not sure I ever would have thought to using sinking instead of culling if I were adding terrain to a game engine.

Fascinating stuff. Wish you all the luck with your engine, hopefully some big devs pick it up - even if just for a trial run.

Fantastic video and masterfully explained with those cleeeean graphics!

Amazing, such good visuals. Even as someone that knows nothing about programming and game dev, I could understand the concepts intuitively. Very cool, looking forward to what you put out in the future!

Man I love exactly this type of video, nice visuals, easy to understand but still kinda deep

I got into blender not too long ago and it´s amazing how I can actually understand stuff like that now (to a certain degree) when it would have made absolute no sense like half a year ago. That really shows what climbing the learning curve does for you, even when you might don´t see it when getting stuck at a new concept again.

this dude started creating such crazy genius videos, bro needs more subs

this is obscenely fantastic. Clear explanations paired with gorgeous animations which make the explanations intuitive? On the topic of coding for games, but that in a very concrete manner? Solving tangible problems? So many different and incredible notes were hit. I just had to subscribe. I _must_ see more from you.

Amazing production value. Seriously high quality stuff.. good job.

this is a beautiful presentation of these concepts! very accessible.

I have not the slightest understanding of programming or game (engine) development. Yet, I found myself intrigued by this video and feel like I understand the basic concepts you are explaining. That is some top shelf teaching right there!

Just a gamer here, thought it was a free FPS trick video😅, such a good explanation. Hope all the talented game devs in the comment section put all these optimisations techniques and much more and help us the people who still use the good old gtx 1050ti to enjoy good games without the need to make the games look almost as a distorted water painting to make it playable.

Nicely explained. The animations are absolutely mesmerizing!

My heard filled with joy when you mentioned Triangle Trip, It became my main weapon for Performance when I was learning to create terrains.

This video is just amazing! The visuals explaining the sinking illusion are just perfect. Sub

You can compress the vertex data even further by storing the height in a GL_R32F texture and rendering without any vertex data at all. Having the height in a texture means that you can access the height of neighboring vertices and therefore calculate the normal using finite differences. Another thing you can do is replace your 8x8 grid with a 1x1 grid (6 vertices) and then use the tesselation shader to tesselate it again. By calculating the tesselation factors using distance to the camera (or even the view frustrum) you get levels of detail "for free". At least in theory. In practice you'd have to benchmark this approach to see if it's actually faster.

this video is insane man, genuine thanks for posting

This video is absurdly well made.

Just found you in my recommended. You are an absolutely underrated game dev UKposts channel, and I hope your channel will blow up one day! :)

I love videos like this, subbed I hope to see more cool stuff!

this is awesome, your videos are crazy good, i hope i can implement optimization this cool in my engine

I don’t make games, but you’re very clear and informative.

As a cheap gamer I really appreciate optimization, and I notice the most when it is not there, I swear most games never try to optimize, and if they did console games could suddenly run on mobile devices easily, it is amazing how much they miss out on

This is truly awesome! Congratulations, this is art! Loved every bit of this video.

Never been so decisive on liking a video before, beautifully well done!!

Your videos are great. Hoping for a shader course from you some day.

This can really be abstracted into an ultimate balance of RAM vs flops. As cores getting more efficient in the future, with MLSS and other techs, more and more things will be inferred from even less information. It is exciting to experience this transition in our lifetime.

Great content and smooth animations, well done!

thank you for this, as still begginer dev just seeing what can be done is great, and you explain it very well

Very nice. I thought I might have to stitch the low and high levels of detail together. I never thought about sinking. I also need to upgrade my heightmap terrain to be more robust so that I can handle tunnels, natural bridges, overhangs, and underground caverns.

Oh i like this format!

Epic video, great work. I hope more videos come soon.

beautiful animations mate, great job!

Ahh, I've noticed a couple of places in Tears of the Kingdom, and a few other modern games where terrain just kind of melted away. I knew it had something to do with LOD, but I just thought low quality meshes were transforming to higher quality meshes, and vertices were repositioning accordingly. I didn't consider the much more sensible conclusion that the terrain was just sinking below the higher quality mesh to be hidden.

Activision devs need to watch this

Glad to see the work you're doing these days Verc, excited to see where this new project goes.

Brilliant! Great work on the visuals! Keep up the good work. Subscribed.

great visualizations! the last technique was particularly novel to me

You can render the terrain in chunks which eliminates the need for "sinking". At the border of two chunks with different LODs you can use vertex sliding to match the verts up for seamless transition. Using chunks also lets you frustum cull large swathes of terrain for cheap. You can use a heightmap as your vertex data and derive your vertex position & normals at runtime in the shader - a uint16 heightmap is more than enough for most games. This is less bandwidth but more ALU, something GPUs are good at and sampling heightmap textures is relatively cheap.

Very interesting, many thanks!

Great explanations and _fantastic_ animation. I don't even do game dev but heck, subscribing.

These are fun! Can you make a series where you explain from scratch about how to make games? It doesn't have to be deep, you can use simple examples that are more tailored to beginners who are discovering the programming world of games

I'm no expert at games, but a way to only talk to someone once instead of 12 times sounds great to an introvert like me

Good explanation of the basics. Thanks

Dude, you are awesome. Keep it up!!