Hey everyone!
As mentioned last week, I will briefly explain some of the optimisation I’ve been doing over the last few weeks, and show some of the bugs that have occurred as a result!
As I already explained a little while ago, our primary goal in setting up the island had been to first make it look good - and to optimise after. When the island was finished, this meant that there were some areas in which my FPS (on ultra) dropped as low as 15, which was obviously not good enough. As a result, I decided to focus on optimisation for a little bit.
I have had a long list of possible ways to optimise the game for months now, but considering that it hadn’t been needed yet, I had largely ignored that list (and I am still ignoring much of it). However, one of our large bottlenecks was the rendering done on the CPU side, and so I used a number of measures to try to move as much of that rendering over to the GPU as possible.
The result is now a decent 30 FPS in the most demanding areas of the map, and up to 60 FPS in less demanding areas. While this could still be improved, I have moved on to optimising the combat between pirates and soldiers for now, considering there is another bottleneck there, and 30 FPS is sufficient for the time being.
However, with the optimisation came a range of new visual bugs, some of which we found particularly amusing:
For one, many of the trees hadn’t been set up properly, and they ended up never disappearing when they got cut down (see above). Our sawmills then ended up cutting down whole forests that were just lying around, which led to a lush if somewhat wasteful look of the forests afterwards.
For another, when playing in co-op, the allied commander turned into somewhat of a genie/ghost (see today’s picture). I still haven’t figured out what exactly was happening here, but from a certain range on, the other commander simply disappeared from the bottom up.
I will keep working on the optimisation and bug fixing, and will keep you updated!
Until next week!