Good day soldiers,
I hope you're all enjoying the Operation Battleaxe update that released a short while ago. I managed to release it ahead of schedule in the hopes of giving everyone some new content for the holiday season. Given the festivities and traveling around this time of year, I knew development would slow a bit and wanted to be sure to deliver Battleaxe in a timely manner. And while the holiday season has indeed slowed my development just a tad, there are definitely new and exciting things coming to Brass Brigade in the near future.
First Person Mode
I was personally a bit skeptical about implementing this, as up to this point in development, I never intended Brass Brigade to be an FPS. However, after a handful of suggestions asking for it, I decided to give it a try, and the results definitely mix-up the Brass Brigade experience - in a good way that is!
Players will now be able to seamlessly switch between the default third-person camera mode and a new first-person camera mode. However, this is not a first person mode akin to most standard FPS games. The camera literally moves into your character's head space and tracks from that position.
It is a very "immersive" experience similar to how games like ArmA and Post Scriptum handle their first person mode. It makes shooting over obstacles and navigating interior spaces easier since the player does not need to combat the third-person camera in enclosed areas. If nothing else, it provides a very different way of experiencing the battles, at eye level.
Please note that this mode was more of an experiment gone reasonably well. As such, I am happy to include in into the game, but how much more it gets developed depends entirely on how much I am willing to treat this game as both a third AND first person game. Either way, I hope you enjoy it - I certainly do!
New Optimization & Performance Options
Some users are still reporting poor performance even for relatively low bot counts. In an attempt to try and further combat this, some adjustments and options have been made for future builds.
- In the Settings > Graphics and Audio menu, there is a new option called "Bullet Impact Particles". Disabling this will remove the debris and dust that gets kicked up from small-arms gunfire and significantly increases performance for high bot counts.
- The bot vision slider has a much greater effect on performance and how far bots can see as the bot count increases. As the bot count increases, bots now see "less far" than they did before, aiding performance.
- The bot CPU Time sliders also have a stronger effect on how frequently bots calculate their AI. Reducing this as the bot count increases is strongly recommended, and will automatically occur as the bot count increases.
- Since bots don't collide with one another, their pathfinding was adjusted to ignore finding paths around one another, simplifying pathfinding calculations and mildly increasing performance.
Optimization Addendum
Laptop Performance Tips
I've noticed that of the reports of poor performance, it seems that laptops suffer from poor performance more frequently than desktops. Laptops usually have lower performance than their desktop counter-parts, however slight, but the disparity caused me to do some digging into the Unity Engine on laptops.
- For reasons passing understanding, Unity Engine games struggle to properly detect laptop GPU hardware correctly. A preliminary step to potentially boosting performance on laptops is to make sure that your dedicated graphics card is set as the actual graphics device being used when launching Brass Brigade (or other graphics intensive programs for that matter). Guides for how to do this whether you have an AMD or Nvidia graphics card are easily available online.
- Be sure your laptop is plugged into a charger.
- Make sure your power-plan is set to "High Performance"
Unity Engine Benchmarking
Please note that the following are my own findings; your results may differ.
I decided to test Brass Brigade's performance on a laptop equipped with an i7 6600HQ processor, GTX1060 6GB, and 16GB of RAM. With 100 bots, default instant action settings, and the lowest graphics settings, I had an average of 30-50FPS, depending on the map. Maps with more foliage tend to run slower than those without. I could squeeze out about 120-130 bots before the average really started to fall below 30FPS for any map. For reference, the current Steam build as of 12/17/2019 would average no more than 25FPS for any map at only 100 bots. More over, another similarly themed, Battlefield-esque bot FPS game built on the Unity Engine runs at around 30FPS average with around 150 bots on the same machine. On a desktop with an i7 7700k, a GTX1080, and 16GB, the results were a lot better for both. It seems to me that laptop hardware is less forgiving and unfriendly to CPU-intensive games in the Unity Engine.
My Unity profiler tells me that the majority of CPU time is being spent calculating physics and rendering the image to screen; the bot AI is no longer the dominant time-sink. This is what led to the introduction of toggling things like the particle effects, terrain details, etc. I am looking for more options I can introduce to the user so they can tweak the game to find a happy balance between visual fidelity and performance. Back to the Unity Documentation and benchmarks I go! It's worth noting that newer versions of Unity claim to offer better performance for certain things that Brass Brigade relies on, so I am also investigating migrating the project to newer engine versions further in the future. This is a risky proposition though as features I use in the older version may be deprecated in newer versions, requiring rewrites or refactoring just to break even.
Thanks for your Support
I'm glad to see so many people are having fun customizing battles to their liking. Some Youtubers such as GrimyGamer have posted videos showcasing what I suspect are 100-150 bot battles, which you can watch below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80rkHNmQyQ
Some other Youtubers such as BaronVonGames and Dragonece Gameplay have made commentary/review videos. I appreciate their kind words and fantastic feedback! Have a listen if you're still on the fence of purchasing Brass Brigade!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40f5WhCZvRg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKarWtFpmxE
I hope you're enjoying the game as much as I've enjoyed making it so far. All of the support and exposure is what helps drive my ability to continue building Brass Brigade. And for that, I offer my sincerest appreciation and gratitude.
The Future
Obviously, all of the aforementioned things are next to be released, but there is more in the way of traditional content being developed too. Additional Eastern Front maps have been requested by many players, so I'm beginning to explore that theater of war a bit more. I'm also drafting new special abilities for the player and conjuring up new weapons. Look for more news of this in the coming weeks.
Enjoy the Holiday Season!
-H.