SphereOpt

SphereOpt v0.8.2 should be considered a "beta" release. The worst you should is experience is errors or graphical glitches, in which case you can uninstall the mod. Please report any issues you encounter.

Improves rendering of Dyson Shells by drastically reducing the amount of data sent to the gpu per shell. Impact is larger depending on the number of shells in your Dyson Sphere(s).

In a new game with a large and densely packed sphere containing 5,240 shells, framerate increased from 18fps with DSPOptimizations alone to ~85fps with SphereOpt.

DSPOptimizations is not required, but I don't know why you wouldn't use it if you're interested in this mod.

Known Limitations

• does not support shell textures other than the default one. planning on tackling this before 1.0, but each design means another draw call. currently drawing once per layer (so, up to 10), but with 7 textures, that's up to 70 draw calls. that's still a hell of a lot better than 1 per individual shell, so I'm probably splitting hairs here.
• does not support painting/colors on shells. this was just an additional layer of complexity that I haven't dug into yet. planning to have this in before 1.0.

Changelog

• v0.8.2
  • fixes bright green glow on unbuilt frames/nodes in the dyson sphere editor
  • slight performance increase
• v0.8.1
  • fixes error when using shells on the 10th dyson sphere layer.
• v0.8.0
  • major rework of shell rendering. individual hexagons are now instanced and rendered in one draw call per layer.
  • added basic LOD and frustum culling for both frames and nodes. fps now greatly increases when the sphere is not in view.
  • misc optimizations on shells/frames/nodes
  • all together, increases fps from 55 to 85 on my benchmark giant dense sphere.
• v0.7.1
  • fix bug with clipping shells at edges
• v0.7.0
  • various optimizations
  • fixed unfinished shell rendering
  • fixed lighting on dyson frames