Time for a tech update
After a week's grafting, I am relieved ...to see the first actual working test of the experimental occlusion mapping system. It's working better than I'd expected, as this was all a bit of a gamble to be honest, it's totally custom stuff
Right, so here is a test map in the editor:
... and here is the first working demo of the basics of it working. It is very generous (to ensure we don't see machines 'popping in' as we go around corners), and there's other (much easier) stuff yet to add, to hide machines that are simply offscreen to the left/right/behind the camera.
This is the real meat though, this is determining machines that cannot possibly be visible (ie. 'occluded' by ones that are closer to us) and only drawing/updating the potentially visible ones. If the arcade contained hundreds of machines, the system would cope just fine without killing the CPU... expect a larger demo soon
So on the right, you can see what you'd see when playing the arcade. On the left, you can see a debug overhead view, and you can notice a red line, that is the forward-looking direction of my camera. You will see machines popping in and out of existence on the left (so saving CPU), but on the right, you cannot tell this is happening (as the one's being made invisible are safely behind machines that are blocking our view of them)