Welcome to the sixth Soulstone Survivors devlog!! You are about to witness some work in progress of a new skill, performance improvements and some changes to how the crafting UI looks.
Next major update is already getting closer and closer, so we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Performance Improvements - XP Crystals
Before we get to the good stuff, lets get the usual performance update out of the way. This time around we are going to be looking at changes made to the XP crystals. During a match, players can sometimes accumulate many hundreds or even thousands of XP crystals laying around on the map and this can lead to significant performance degradation.
Luckily, the XP crystals have a very well defined behavior which is very suitable for some pretty neat optimizations. Check out the results we got from said optimizations:
Before
After
In these videos you can see me spawning 100k XP crystals on a 50 meter radius around the player. Before the changes, my machine could barely handle it, running the game at single-digit FPS whereas after the changes it has no problem at all, reaching over 100 FPS.
Now for the nerds in all of us, a big, but not the only reason why these crystals are so much lighter now is the rendering. Before we were using vanilla Unity rendering techniques (i.e.: mesh renderers). But now, put it a different way, we tell the GPU: “here, render 100k copies of this object”, as opposed to “render some here, some other here, another there…”.
Now, we manually render all of the crystals using GPU instancing, which allows us to render every crystal at once, reducing the overhead. Check out these visual examples below:
Unity Vanilla Rendering
The New Approach
The top version is Unity’s vanilla rendering: it takes 3 draw-calls to render the crystals; where the bottom gif with the new approach only takes 1 draw-call to render all of them.
New Upcoming Skill
We have also been working on some new skills recently and our artists have been doing an awesome job on those and we often need new 3D models for them. Check out this 3D model for an upcoming new skill:
Visual Changes in the Blacksmith UI
Lucas, one of our programmers has been working on how the crafting tab currently looks, to improve its readability. Check out the screenshot below to see how that is going:
And this was all we had to show for this Devlog! We have been hard at work to improve performance, UI visibility and new skills. But keep an eye out for news because we have some really cool stuff coming... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team