Hello Faithful Wishlisters,
The snappiness and overall feel of Cleared Hot is one of my top priorities. The game was starting to drop fps in larger missions and it was time for a clean-up. Physics Ragdolls were the first order of business.
Ragdolls
Our NPCs use something called Active Ragdolls, to allow physics to interact with NPCs that are following animations. But calculating the physics for this takes a lot of CPU time. So our first effort was to reduce this to only the times that ragdolls, or active ragdolls, were needed.
It was important that we maintain the physics fun-ness of being able to run over NPCs. So we started there.
If you watch the gif closely, you can see the frame where the ragdoll gets enabled, right before being run over. This allows us to save the CPU time of ragdolls and only use it when we really need it: when they get run over.
Let's see it at full speed now...
Fixing Collisions with Many NPCs
Once we start adding a lot of NPCs, there used to be some stutters when colliding with many of them at once. It would cause some strange behaviors and overall just made it not feel very smooth.
So we started experimenting with simplifying collisions with NPCs and vehicles and other physics objects, and restricting the collisions to their main torso collider. This simplifies a lot, increases performance, and makes the collisions look better.
Doing this allowed us to increase the number of NPCs getting run over to 50.
Changing this required a large number of test cases. Ariel from the team took this on and built quite an impressive list of test scenarios.
After making all these changes, we compared the NPC performance using a test we made earlier of 50 npcs all shooting each other.
With our changes, the avg FPS on my machine went from 144 to 275, a 91% improvement. Of course this is only in the worst case scenario, but we should see a really nice bump across our missions with this in place.
I am super excited this all came together and I had a ton of fun working on it with the team.
Bonus gif.
Playtest Survey
Our playtest survey is going out to the email list this week! Sign up here if you haven't already: https://clearedhotgame.com/email-list/
The playtest will be small, with 2-3 missions, and we will start with only 10 playtesters. But this will grow over time.
As always, thanks for your support!
-Colin and the Cleared Hot team