Hey everyone.
As some of you may know, we've been hard at work on the full game. It's been smooth so far, and we've made good progress this month. During development, we reworked one core mechanic and heavily optimized the game. We've also added official full controller support, sweeping bug fixes, and much more.
Throwables
We have completely reworked how throwables work in the game. Instead of being immediately thrown with a *shitty* animation, throwables now have different states with accompanying animations. You can take out the throwable using the wheel, prepare to throw it, and throw it. Essentially, it brings the mechanic to the standard that the rest of the game sets. There are 9 animations for each throwable, resulting in a total of 27 new animations for them.
But wait, there's more! Grenades that explode or contribute to spreading fire now dynamically affect vegetation. They blow it up, make it on fire; whatever it really wants.
Optimization
There are two major things we've accomplished in this regard. The first one is a major memory reduction.
While developing new content, we needed a much bigger area to work with. This required us to use multiple 'terrains'. Each terrain is around 1x1KM. When we shipped builds to testers to play through the new content, we had a lot of crashes. These crashes are consistently caused by being out of system memory. This led to an investigation. As it turns out, each terrain was using 9GB(!) of RAM. With 3 terrains in the level, we were using 27GB of RAM for just the ground.
We had never found this, as it was never a problem with only one terrain, which was all we used previously. As it turns out, this was due to how we render vegetation. To simplify things, each piece of vegetation had too many variables stored individually, being incredibly wasteful. Things like scale, position, rotation, etc. Because there are 10,000s of ferns and grass, these variables took up a ton of memory. Typically, these things would be combined in a much more efficient way. So we did that.
Now each terrain uses 13MB of RAM. Something ridiculous like a 99.86% reduction. This now technically means the game can run on less than 8GB of RAM. We won't officially say that, as we might use some more in the future for bigger levels or new features, but we'll leave that information out there. Not only did we save on RAM, but we also saved on rendering performance. Scenes with vegetation in them now render about 10-20% faster in our testing.
Our second accomplishment is about stutters. They've been a hassle for a while, but we have finally remedied it. This month, I set out to have a good experience on my not-so-great PC. The specs are the following. I5-7600k, 16GB DDR4, and a GTX 1070. My goal was to get a smooth 60FPS at 1080p with FSR. I also decided to play far away on a TV and with a controller. All of which we'll talk about later.
We've hit that goal this month (for the most part). There is one angle in the second level that likes to tank performance on low-mid end machines, but otherwise it's a capped 60FPS. There is still the occasional stutter that we have no idea about; it happened a couple times in our many runs of the game this month.
Balancing and General Gameplay
Back in August, we mentioned balancing the amount of ammunition and bandages you ended up with throughout the demo. After not a lot of thought, we decided it was still too much. We've nerfed the amount of ammunition you get again and changed some spawns for healables. This now makes the gameplay loop much better in our opinion, and is closer to the vision we seek. We've also made some changes to general gameplay, mostly fixing bugs that dealt with ADS. For instance, the Depth of field was partially wrong in that it blurred the wrong parts of the screen. Its behavior has now been fixed and only blurs the close sights.
There are also some gameplay additions we've made. For example, a more visceral hit reaction for the player, and generally reduced recoil for most weapons.
We've also added a new phase transition to the boss in the demo. He'll now do something that shakes up the fight a bit more.
Full controller support
As part of my not-so-great PC, I only used a controller. This made me find a lot of annoyances and generally just didn't feel great. So we've gone ahead and done everything needed for a great experience with the controller. We've fixed all UI related grievances, fixed sensitivity inconsistencies, added glyphs, etc. We haven't added the controller layout yet to the menu, but that will come shortly. We will not support rebinding controller inputs.
Looking forward
We're preparing to enter a more aggressive schedule, focusing more on content. We weren't able to get the weapon workbench in this update, as we wanted it to be more in-depth than originally pitched. We're unsure if the demo will receive an update in November, but we'll keep you up to date. At the very least, a dev-log will be published showing bits and pieces of our new work. As always, we'll leave you a little sneak peek as to what's next.
Make sure to join our Discord and stay tuned for upcoming updates.
Many thanks,
SK Studios