Good News/ Bad News

 

Good News: Gameplay is engaging and mesmerizing in 0.5.3. The dialogue makes it interesting, tons of items, tons of locations, all previous issues resolved, ravens are optimized, siren is optimized, shadows are optimized, bugs are fixed, layout for 3rd map segment is done, new models integrated, new hideouts integrated.

Bad News: The picture above is what defeat looks like. Spent two days total finalizing foliage for the new map. It is now 11:40 pm at night and I started working at 6:00 am in the morning. When you deduct breaks and a quick nap, total work time amounts to 12 hours and 11 hours yesterday. (technically, you'd also have to deduct ue4 restarts, because of a fun little engine bug that fucks up the foliage editor when you switch between the foliage editor and blueprint view in your game, good times)

How did I get this game down to 2.5 frames per second? I added miniature versions of willows to create a "bush level" inside the forest distribution. Before I did it I thought: "You really should create a separate foliage instance for that, before you do it" and then I went like: "NAAAHHH, it'll be FINE, let's just adjust scale of the original models".

The original models have complex collision and high detail shadow maps enabled. So with the stroke of a brush (several strokes actually), I added 70.000 additional instances of this model with dynamic shadows enabled. The big ones NEED the dynamic shadow enabled, the small ones definitely do not. Because they are spread out in between the trees, there is now no easy way to remove them.

The drop in framerate happens during map chunk transitions. The maps are divided into smaller chunks, that are streamed through code (not through UE4 level streaming). They are loaded at startup and then hidden, so there are no hickups during explorations. This only works if the foliage distribution on each chunk is manageable for the GPU. 

Surprise. It is not manageable for the GPU, when you add 70.000 fucking bonsai versions of your most detailed assets to the map with dynamic shadows enabled. GTX 1080 had a performance peak at 99% and that's when I made that gorgeous screenshot.

Average FPS is still 30-40, but that's way below target. Target must be safely above 60 on most higher level machines. It's above 60 on the other map segments.

So why is this defeat? 

Since they are all part of the same foliage instance, I'll need to remove them all, then create a new instance for the willow bushes and then redo everything from scratch. Estimate 16-18 hours of work.

And because this day only has 1 hour and 10 minutes left, that is why this is defeat.

For now.

Sorry testers. I tried. I really did.