Hello Gamecrafters!
This week we wanted to share some details on some of the optimization work that has been going on behind the scenes recently, and where we’re focusing next while the latest update works its way through the Preview branch. We’ve also been hard at work improving multiplayer so we’ll share a little bit on the current state of that too!
Ongoing Optimization
The team has been working extremely hard over the past few months trying to optimize various areas of Gamecraft alongside developing new features. Here are a few of the latest changes that are going on in the Preview branch.
Label Optimization
We uncovered some performance issues caused by the fact that labels (used for Text Blocks, Counters etc.) were being processed every frame, when it was quite often the case that these would rarely actually need to be updated. This has all been cleaned up now so games that had lots of these parts should now perform much better. There’s still some more work to do though.
Wire Optimization
With the new UX changes we’ve also taken the opportunity to revisit the wires themselves, optimizing the connections, ports and rendering so interacting with the config panels and wiring should feel a bit more responsive.
Optimized Meshes
This one is just a small change to lower general RAM usage by a considerable amount. There should be no noticeable changes to anything in-game.
Static Blocks in Larger Saves
There is still some more work to be done in this area but larger levels with hundreds of static blocks like Grass, Dirt and blocks that are static simply by being connected to them should run better already.
Lower Quality Setting Tweaks
We’ve made a couple of small changes to the lower two quality settings to squeeze out as much performance as we can without sacrificing the visual quality too much.
The next area of focus is getting Gamecraft to run consistently well on our minimum spec, which will also come with some nice performance gains for everyone. There are a number of big optimizations planned there, such as:
- Implementing LODs on more parts
- Lowering the clipping plane to avoid rendering excess parts
- Splitting static and dynamic cubes properly to stop processing static cubes more than necessary
- Optimizing our Post-Process effects, skybox and more
- Re-enable “sleeping” on dynamic cubes that are no longer moving to cut down on unneeded processing
- Implement sub-resolution settings
Progress on Multiplayer
Alongside the recent UX Improvements and other epic features we’ve been working on, we’ve been dedicating some more time to digging into the core problems with the current system and working out a solid plan to get multiplayer into a stable, enjoyable experience.
In doing so, we’ve uncovered a flaw in the original design which we have devised a solution to, but that uncovered further issues that are now being addressed.
It will be a while before this is ready to go live but we’re hoping to get the system in a much more stable and optimized state, which we’re really looking forward to getting this in your hands as soon as it is ready.
Featured Game
We have a new featured game! Story of the Brave by Gotou810. We’ll be releasing a Josh Plays video of this later on but be sure to check it out.
Preview Branch
As part of our new release process, the latest update has now entered the Preview Branch, where we plan on polishing and iterating on it for the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested in trying out an early version of this update to give us feedback and report issues then you can find more information in our official Discord server.
We’ll also be reworking the content of our dev blogs slightly over the next few weeks while we get into the new flow. We’ll continue to tease upcoming features but we’ll shift the timing slightly so that we only showcase features that are in the current preview, so you don’t have to wait as long between seeing epic new things and being able to actually play with them!
Please follow us on our social spaces and share your creations with us:
Twitter- https://twitter.com/Gamecraft_FJ
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkcRFCr9aQxszaYeXcWZjwA
Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/GamecraftGame/
Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/GamecraftGame/
Discord - https://discord.gg/gamecraft
Thanks for reading!
The Gamecraft Team