Hello everyone,
We recently released the demo for Gamma 19 and it has surprisingly been a smooth launch. We seemed to have over 1000 downloads, but only 38 people who have launched the game. However, we have gotten some feedback and so far only one small bug reported and a lot of useful suggestions that could make the game even better. We hope that more people will play it during the Steam Next Fest on Feb. 6th.
Performance Improvements
So far we had two people report poor performance. Both running the game on underpowered systems. We are happy to announce a major performance update for Gamma 19, aimed at improving the gaming experience for players with lower-end systems. Originally the minimum requirements was a GPU with 2 GB of VRAM as the game would get close to using that much VRAM. Now according to the editor's monitoring tools the game uses on average 500 mb of VRAM with the highest being 1 GB (So far in one scene). Originally the game would use over 1 GB on average.
But how does a 2D game use so much VRAM?
You might be asking yourself this question and I got an answer. Gamma 19 uses high res assets and a lot of animations. It's pretty normal for use to have a spritesheet that is over 6000x6000. The size of the file is usually small, around 1 mb, but that's when it is compressed in a png format. When the images are loaded into the graphics card they are stored uncompressed and could go from 1 mb to 50 mb in size. This adds up and can cause performance issues on system with under 2 GB of VRAM. So I did some things to try to help reduce this size.
- Static sprites are now stored on a texture atlas. This creates one texture with all of the sprites for one level where the engine will read and assign the sprites from. This way the game only has to load one texture and it can reuse it for many objects while also keeping the assets from losing quality.
- Animated sprites are now VRAM compressed. Animated spritesheets can reach massive sizes and there is nothing we can do as this is the nature of animations. This is a feature of Godot that is supposed to be used for 3D games as it does create artifacts in the textures. However, from testing we can notice some artifacting but you have to be look out for it. Only one sprite has extremely noticeable artifacting and was left uncompressed.
How to get the best performance on a low end system
From testing Gamma 19 on my personal laptop(It uses intel integrated graphics) I was able to hit 60 fps after reducing the screen resolution in the settings menu. Depending on your system you might not have to reduce it all that much, or a lot. Even in the scene where the VRAM usage hit 1 GB I was still getting 60 fps.
We hope you enjoy the improved performance of Gamma 19 on your system, and please let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions for future updates.