The Early Access version has been out for a week now. Thanks for everyone supporting the game in any way, by buying it, giving feedback, or giving it visibility in any way!
Although pretty much all coverage of the game has mentioned the problems with optimization and bugs, I've gotten the idea from most of it that people think there's a good game underneath. You can be sure that I'll keep polishing it, weeding out the bugs, and doing my best to make it a pleasant experience for an as wide range of players as possible.
With the concerns about the GPU optimization of the game, I prioritized that as the first thing to address with an update. Fixing bugs will be a longer lasting effort, and I'll start delving into people's gameplay footage to spot them, alongside starting to implement customizable input.
List of optimizations on this update (clarifying video below):
- Changed the first and third person cameras to be one camera in two different modes, which seems to have removed moments of low framerate resulting from switching the camera in some situations
- Changed the Screen Space Global Illumination to a lower quality, which seemed to have a big effect (SSGI is only enabled on the High setting).
- In the first mission, I removed a particle fog that was especially laborous for the GPU
- Enemies were animated in an update function meant for physics (because of the physics bones in the knots of their bandanas). Changing them to be animated the normal way removed some small, repetitive lag spikes
- There were also some lag spikes resulting from entering and exiting trigger colliders changing things like lighting, viewpoint and disabling sea and weather effects. Some changes in code made those lag spikes unnoticable.
- Since I noticed that during the intro cinematic (which is now played as a video) my GPU was trying to render the game in 200fps, I set the default target framerate to 120 instead of uncapped
- I adjusted local colliders enabling shadows on light sources to further limit the number of big, expensive shadows being shown at the same time in the big ship on Mission 3.
Bugfixes:
- On a level that's been loaded the first time (not loaded from save or restarted from the button) the AI didn't see the player at all. That had slipped from me thus far, but now it's fixed.
- Small improvement on the list of throwables that gets introduced in the third mission: when pressing a number key, it now shows the list even if there's nothing in that slot.
The list of the optimizations may not tell you much as such, but below is a video comparison between the previous build and this build, showing frame rate in the corner.
The video contains some spoilers regarding environments, in case you want to avoid them.