Wow, so this is a big one. If you've been following the quick fixes for the last 4 updates, I have really focused on addressing refund notes for the game. (If any were left at all.) The big takeaways from those notes were, lack of enemies/combat & lack of optimization.
Introducing a new Wave Based Gamemode Sector Breach!
1 new wave based survival map.
Start with only the icepick and find loot boxes.
Added loot boxes that spawn random items.
Added new achievement, character, and dialogue for new mode.
Access the new mode from the main menu.
I will expand on this mode with new levels and features in the future.
With adding over 200+ more npc encounters to the game, adding weapons, new animations, massive level overhauls, improving enemy types, adding in new ones, and the new wave based gamemode, I think it's fair to say the first complaint is addressed.
So with the rest of this update I really wanted to focus on the other complaint. Godot and optimization.
I've pretty much taken the first half of November to rewrite every script of code in the game.
Yes, every single line.
Taking everything I've learned in my prototypes for other projects, scouring forums, and watching hours of youtube videos. I've tried every public trick in the book to get GPU usage down and FPS up.
First step was going through every single scene and optimizing meshes and surface materials. I played around with each scene's baked lighting & fog.
Typically games have one viewport for the player, but there are some multimedia elements and live camera views from ripples in reality. These effects are brief but demanding on the GPU, so I've done everything I can to simplify these images. Not just lowering their resolution but putting restrictions on the camera updates, cull updates, draw distance, and disabling out of range.
Then I went into every single enemy script and reworked a lot of the AI scripts to call functionalities less often and under more discrete circumstances. Disabling and hiding them at certain distances away from the player. Or in some cases preventing AI from accessing player data if not currently being interacted with.
Next was updating to the newest version of Godot so I could replace the default physics engine for Godot with Jolt. Jolt is the superior physics engine for Godot. It allows the exact same physics calculations and interactions to occur but for less cost.
I've reduced the file size of every single level in the game. I've done this by preloading chunks and segments of repeated level geometry. This allows level file sizes to be smaller by having pre-defined versions of elements reused in each level.
I hope these changes improve overall performance. I'll be doing some playthroughs on the Steam Deck to further evaluate bottenocked levels and continue to work on squeezing every bit of performance I can out of those bits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R_VMDg3isc
If you get lost in your playthrough refer to the walkthrough guide or reach out on the Steam forums :
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3312249014