Greetings, Void Hunters! ːsssthumbː
We bid you welcome to yet another Soulstone Survivors Devlog! In this one we are going to dig a bit deeper into our first Content Sneak Peek (if you missed it check out the post below), talk a lilttle about the new game mode and share some massive performance gains coming soon! This is a good one, so grab your tea or coffee, get comfy and come with me!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/2066020/announcements/detail/4441207839043617810
Special Edition Dev Talk
First, we wanted to announce that we are working on a special edition Dev Talk! We will share what we have learned so far from developing Soulstone Survivors, and more importantly, how we are using these lessons in the creation of the new future content!
In this edition we will also share further details about what you can expect from our next game mode, which is going to be, by very far, the BIGGEST content update to the game ever!
It’s coming out on our YouTube channel on December 21st, so keep an eye out!
Content Sneak Peek - Mhyzahet, Terror of the Sands
A couple of weeks ago we updated our public roadmap, and together with it our first sneak peek into a HUGE content update that is coming! There is A LOT more where that came from and we will reveal the next sneak peek next Friday, but today we wanted to look at bit closer at Mhyzahet, one of the new bosses coming to the game!
Some of you noticed that this boss might not work exactly like the others do… so I thought it would be fun to share a little bit more!
First a little trivia: Did you know that all bosses in the game are named after the developers and people important to us? This time around is no different, for this one we decided to pay homage to Mhysa, an incredibly kind and awesome member of our Discord community, the author of the incredible “Mhysa’s Guide to a Successful Survivor”! The game wouldn’t be the same without you Mhysa!
Now, what can you expect from this encounter? Some of you noticed that this boss has a very specific place in the map… a proper boss room! This is coming as a part of our new game mode, where after you complete… well, lets say “something” for now =P, you gain access to the boss of the map, in this case, the Lair of Mhyzahet.
This new boss is special in more than one way. We want it to be a meaningful encounter, and with a set layout for the boss room, we can leverage the layout of the room to create more interesting skills. But not only you can expect a greater challenge, defeating this titanic creature will also grant you a new type of unique power up, from a pool of power ups that can only be found from this specific boss!
There is a lot more to talk about, but if you want to learn more details about how this new game mode will work, make sure to check out our special edition Dev Talk mentioned above!
Projectile Performance
As you probably know by now, performance has been a big priority for us. We have made huge strides in multiple areas, but there is one that is currently the worst FPS killer… the dreaded… projectiles ːssssadː!
Skills like Fan of Bombs currently can cause massive FPS drops if you abuse it with a lot of skill chains, multicast and cast frequency. For a long time we have been investigating what we could do to improve the situation… and well, I’ll let the video below speak for itself:
In the video we are showcasing Spreadshot with 10k Extra Cast chance and 10k Cast Frequency, also known as “crazy numbers”. First, we use the standard Spreadshot, which runs at an average of 13.8 FPS, or, in another words, using 72ms per frame (definitely not the slowest skill out there!). Then, we switch to the new and optimized Spreadshot in the exact same scenario, and it runs at an average of 47.8 FPS, or in another words, using 20.9ms per frame. The graph below illustrates these numbers with more precision:
Now let me give you a TL;DR: with the latest optimizations, we managed to make projectiles 70% faster to run than before. Not all projectiles will get the full treatment because it is an arduous process, but ALL projectiles will be a lot faster! This end result is a combination of 3 techniques:
- Remade physics logic: we now use a different, multithreaded logic to simulate the physics for projectiles, which is much, much faster than before. It does come at a small loss of precision, but the gains are massive and worth it in a game like ours;
- Remade visual effects: it might be hard to tell from the video because they look so similar, but a big part of the performance gain came from switching from the old Unity Particle System, to the new one. The new one is made to run in the GPU, so it has a smaller overhead in the CPU, which is most of the time the bottleneck. This is actually an arduous process because these systems are very different and we need to remake each projectile by hand, so we will probably implement this improvement slowly, only on the most dire projectiles;
- Repositioning projectiles instead of disabling them: I don’t want to get into too much detail here, but normally, when you are done with an object in a game, like an Enemy or a Projectile in this case, you “turn it off”, so that the Engine knows it doesnt need to care about it, but keeps the object in memory. Then, when you need a new Enemy or Projectile, you get this object again and place it in the position you want it, you turn it on again, telling the engine “hey, remember that projectile? we want to use it again”. This is known as “object pooling” and is pretty standard since it is a lot faster to reuse something than create something new. Now… we noticed that just the act of “enabling” the projectile was causing a crazy high overhead, because the engine needs to “re-register” the projectile internally and do all sorts of stuff, and in this very specific case of projectiles, just moving them away into outter space, and then moving them back, WITHOUT disabling them… made another huge performance difference. (PS: Dont do this at home kids, our architecture supports this well, but its not applicable for every game and architecture)
Closing Thoughts
We are extremely excited about the future of Soulstone Survivors, we have been working for months in the background on a couple of massive features and it feels awesome to finally start to share more with you! Please do let us know your thoughts about what you see in the comments below, and I hope to see you in the next one!
We hope you have a lovely day or night,
~ The Soulstone Team