Solo Game Developer Joyen recently shared an update for Loya, a multiplayer open-world survival crafting game where players can build massive walking structures to explore the world and battle monsters. Joyen has finally achieved optimized, visually appealing volumetric clouds in the game using compute shaders. The clouds are rendered at 1/4 resolution and upsampled along depth-buffer edges.

These are reportedly quite cheap to render, taking around 3-4 ms per frame, while grass is the most performance-heavy part of the game. The game runs well on Joyen's PC, achieving roughly 110 FPS without grass and about 90 FPS with grass enabled on a GTX 1080 Ti.

Joyen based the cloud system on The Real-time Volumetric Cloudscapes of Horizon: Zero Dawn article. According to him, the pipeline starts by passing a depth texture, 3D noise textures, and various parameters into a compute shader running at 1/4 resolution. From there, a ray marching approach is used, along with additional sun occlusion marching. A second pass refines the edges, and the output is then passed into a post-processing shader that renders the final clouds in the scene. The rest is "months of iterating" until Joyen got the right result.

Loya recently received a new gameplay trailer, check it out:

Joyen regularly shares development progress updates, and playtests for Loya are also available. Make sure to wishlist the game and request access on its Steam page.

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