11092019

Started working on an effect for potable, lightly-moving water sources such as ponds and lakes. I was able to adapt a shader effect by GamingReverends to accommodate my needs perfectly; I still have to figure out some of the intricacies of it such as how to properly animate things such as ripples within it and how I’m gonna handle blending the water into the adjacent ground near the shores but otherwise it looks about as good as I can hope for.

I also implemented a culling system for optimising instances (and particularly grass and trees) via two scripts from lazyeye. They work by deactivating and reactivating some of the more taxing instances to reduce the instance load of things like collisions. It seems to work pretty well since the framerate has improved considerably but I’ll have to keep an eye out on it moving forward…

I kinda felt like shit today and kept on getting distracted for unclear reasons. At some point this afternoon I somehow fell into a deep sleep in which I experienced a very strange and alarmingly vivid dream in which I descended into an amorphous and constantly-shifting version of my high school filled with my old friends. None of them seemed to recognise me and we were all lost without any idea how we got there or what we were doing there. The rooms were simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic and while I initially could recognise each individual room for what it was – a certain classroom, the backrooms of the auditorium, a stairwell we used to hang out in, the gymnasium – when I examined them closer or tried to make sense of where I was all of a sudden the rooms seemed impossibly foreign and even ancient, every dimension and corner evading not only description but observation itself. I don’t know how else to describe it. It felt like we’d been wandering for centuries. 

I don’t how I got out; but it was as equally abrupt and inexplicable as the rest of what happened. For nearly an hour after waking I felt discombobulated and completely disoriented, not exactly sure if I was really awake or if I’d just ascended (descended?) to another depth of the dream. I was only asleep for an hour but it felt like far, far longer.

I recorded all of this down immediately upon waking but every time I tried to recall some specific detail I could feel the presence of this… it felt like there was something burned into the inside of my skull, that I would be able to see if only I could somehow look behind my eyes. I’m not really sure how else to describe it. Thankfully the feelings have by and large subsided, and only a trace of an unpleasant memory remains…