Introduction

Recently I've been busy on some new afterburner effects. The previous "volumetric" afterburners worked, but performance proved troublesome in a typical 20-aircraft dogfight. These afterburners would use 200 semi-transparent objects to achieve the volumetric effect, resulting in 4000 objects in the above scenario (Mind you that is on top of the other objects in the scene). With  the planned 100+ aircraft dogfights in mind, one can see where this is going performance-wise.

ABOVE: The old afterburner effect, looks great, but comes with a serious performance hit. It's comprised of 200 objects.

Solution

I started profiling the scene to look what exactly was causing the lag. Turns out it was a mix of the scripting side looping over each object, and the rendering of all those 200 separate objects per  plane. Wanting to avoid high numbers of objects and looping calculations over and over, I sat down and looked and what options I had. Instead of dividing the afterburner into numerous objects, I went for another approach involving just 2-3 objects per burner. The burner is now comprised of several long cylinders making up the flame. The flame's opacity is controlled with a texture, where I lookup the alpha for that position. Much of this logic for changing the color and other properties was also moved to the shader.

ABOVE: The new afterburner. An unexpected improvement over the old model. Just 3 objects per burner and lightning fast.

Status update

Aggressor is in  a phase of high speed development to meet my own deadlines. Don't take this the wrong way though; I am on schedule, the pace is just fast. Major new stuff is being added every week, along with many, many tweaks and details that I note down to make the absolute most of this game. The first air to air guided missiles are making their way into the battle, starting with the AIM-4 Falcon (or GAR-1) and AIM-7 Sparrow. These two mark the foundation of all future missiles (like the AIM-9X and AIM-120). Tech trees are also being worked on, these will house all weapons in the game that can be unlocked. A player would be able to unlock a weapon once, then equip it for one-time use in a mission. 

Initially, an early access release was planned for release on Steam May 1st, 2021. Upon second thought however, I think the better way is to build up a bit of an audience in the form of wishlists before I bring anything out there. This means there likely won't be an early access, rather an in-development Steam page with some cool screenshots and videos. For now, Itch.io is your main source for Aggressor information.  Flashpoint Studios out!