Hello friends! Things have been pretty quiet here lately while I've been working away at artwork and narrative development, but TODAY we have an optimization and compatibility update.
PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THIS UPDATE AFFECTS PERFORMANCE NEGATIVELY FOR YOU!
This should be obvious in retrospect, but It turns out the Forward+ renderer in Godot leverages Vulkan and broke compatibility with some older hardware, so we've reverted back to the OpenGL renderer. OpenGL means no asynchronous shaders, which introduced micro freezes when activating the platform drop effect. To work around this, we now have a loading screen at the start to cache shaders.
The up side to all of this for EVERYONE is that I went ahead and built a particle effect cache as well! Which means driver updates and fresh installations of Hot Dog Reporter will no longer result in second+ long freezes when a new particle effect triggers.
Here, have a changelog!
- Changed Godot renderer back to Compatibility again. GPU particles in Forward+ were breaking the game on older hardware with limited/no Vulkan support.
- Particle effects and shaders are now cached at launch to avoid in-game stuttering.
- Added loading screen at launch for cache creation.