It's been a while since the last update, but since then, I've made some considerable progress with optimizations. Though there are still lag spikes on moments like opening doors, there are no areas left where the frame rate would be consistently below 30 with my GeForce 3070 with best settings and UHD resolution. Most of the time, it's around 40-50. And those lag spikes I mentioned have been greatly reduced too.
I'm planning to make a lengthier blog post delving more into the tricks I've done to reduce the number of game objects, triangles, shadows and physics objects at use at a given time, but until then, below is a short list of the changes I remember.
Also, here's a gameplay clip showing getting rid of the guards patrolling on the deck of the Behemoth in various creative ways. This large frigate has been one of (if not the most) straining places on the GPU (both exterior and interior). Frame rate on the deck now hovers mostly between 30 and 40, but remember that this is in UHD resolution with the best settings. Capturing specs are in the YouTube description.
Bugfixes:
- M2 escaped scarf that player has to follow no longer has the other hand fixed to carrying animation
- When starting to row immediately after loading save, camera got sometimes lowered to the water level at the start of rowing.
- M1PT2 lighting changes
- M1PT2 NPC placement changes to distribute them more evenly inside and outside for optimization
- When opening map, fixed the map resetting to the world map instead of showing the map last collected
Optimizations:
- Enemies far away are replaced with a non-skinned (non-deforming) low-poly model
- Terrains far from the player are replaced with a low-poly model with simple materials
- Same thing with ships - there are now separate low-poly versions for each ship that their whole complex game object hierarchy is replaced with when they are far
- Carriable objects are automatically disabled when they're in different room than the player
- Made improvements on how the enemies get hidden when in different room than player
- In proximity of books, there's no longer a framerate cost of the pages of the book being rendered (except in one frame)
- Improved the arrangement of clusters of game objects that get hidden when player is far in missions 2 and 3
- Rearranged the NPCs in the dialogue section after mission 1, so that there's not a huge number of NPCs on deck at once.