Terminal Burn

After some extremely low-level faffing, Terminal Burn is working on the Xbox. It's about... 4... frames per second on the 2013 Xbox One, so I have quite some optimisation to achieve still!

That circular sphere of sky you're looking at (5.7GB of GPU later) is the Horizon Zero Dawn cloud trick — rendered onto a flat plane, projected spherically. We suspect it's calculating every pixel outside that boundary too. So we froze it on Performance mode. #TerminalBurn #indie

Clouds move faster when the gusty wind mutator kicks in. Nobody asked for that, nobody will probably clock it, but it's in #TerminalBurn now because it should be. That's the whole job, really. #indiegames #gamedev

The cheap 2D cloud fallback exists so older hardware still gets a sky worth looking at. Volumetric layers for those who can run it, a flat 2D sheet underneath for everyone else. Weather mutators hook into both. #TerminalBurn #indiegames #gamedev

Cloud density and oppressiveness tied directly to the weather mutators now — same scene, different sky, completely different feeling. That's the whole thing in #TerminalBurn. The world just gets heavier when the conditions say so. #indiegames #gamedev

Clouds in #TerminalBurn now move with the wind mutator. That video is the gusty setting doing its thing — no-one was supposed to notice the velocity was hooked up, but here we are. #indiegames #gamedev

Cloud density tied directly to weather mutators now — watch it go from hammering rain to dead-calm overcast to something genuinely threatening rolling back in. That's the sky in #TerminalBurn doing actual work, not just sitting there looking pretty. #indiegames #gamedev

The cheap 2D cloud fallback exists specifically so older hardware doesn't get a void sky in low-angle shots. What you're seeing in those ground-level replay camera views isn't just atmosphere — it's the same scene running two different sky budgets. #TerminalBurn #indiegames #game

Decals sit at the base of the damage in that explosion — anchoring the escaping gas so it reads as pressurised rather than just decorative. Small thing. Makes a big difference to how convincing a breach feels in #TerminalBurn. #indiegames #gamedev