Hi guys,
It is a lot of time we don't post anything related to HELLSEED.
There is a reason for that:
In the last year we have worked A LOT to improve the game performances, loading times and fix some audio problems.
RESTRUCTURED GAME
We have completely restructured the game.
The current online version is built as a single HUGE level.
This implies a lot of problems:
From memory consuption to long loading times and finally in-game performances.
Managing the WHOLE game in a single stage is surely much more heavy than managing small stages at a time.
This is why we have separated the single game level in 5 small levels, and now every level is a CHAPTER.
The improvement is perceivable.
In addition this restructuring allowed us to better control the memory consuption and eventual leaks also on GPU memory. The result is that, now the game fits completely in 3 GB of CPU memory and in 4 GB of GPU memory.
Clever GPU memory consuption is really important for avoiding memory swaps between system RAM and video memory that cause huge framerate dropdowns.
Following is a video comparing the old vs the new loading times
(All tests have been made on an INTEL i5 8600K with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 6GB).
(P.S. occasional game freezes in the NEW version are due to screen capture, in reality the game is perfect):
Also in-game perfomances benefited from that restructuring, but, as I'll explain later, it was not sufficient, expecially on NVIDIA cards.
AUDIO FIX
The game currently online has a lot of audio problems.
Sometimes sounds are intermittent and crackling, sometimes they jump from a ear to another if you use headphones.
It is due to a wrong computation of the sound sources currently playing and, in part, to unused extensions of the audio driver.
We have fixed all these problems, now sounds are always clear.
These fixes have also increased a bit the audio system performances.
PERFORMANCE BOOST
After restructuring the game it seemed that all performance problems gone away, but it was not true.
Expecially on NVIDIA cards the framerate was still too low, on my Geforce GTX 1060 the FPS still slow down close to 40 in some cases.
So I decided to better investigate the problem and finally I decided to radically change the engine rendering system, see a related post here for more info: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/443970/view/4190111862541206008?l=english)
The results are INCREDIBLE!
it was one of the best performance improvement I've experienced during the whole engine development.
Following are some in-game comparing screenshots (don't care about the different screen aberration and the strange numbers on the new version screenshots, it is a w.i.p. version)
(All tests have been made on an INTEL i5 8600K with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1060 6GB):
As you can see the boost is incredible and I was impressed by myself the first time I saw it :).
COMING SOON
Currently we are continuing to test this new version and we planned to make some additional corrections (to gameplay and other) before publishing it.
We hope to be able to publish this new version in about a month (so next month probably it should be ready).
From the releasing of this new version we'll finally be able to finish the game by adding the prologue and the remaining 2 chapters.
Stay tuned,
PROFENIX STUDIO