Some of the changes made lately improve performance rather significantly, so I wanted to get the improvements out asap before moving on to other things.
Better trees:
1 million poly Megascans Beech trees replaced with ~75k poly Beech trees that I think look better with much more detailed bark in addition to majorly improving performance in dense forest.
The "Sunstarved Forest" area has been largely redone with the new trees as well as some new plants with huge leaves that go well with the messy overgrown look of this biome.
Before it was running at as low as 24 FPS on High/Epic in the editor in the dense forest, an now it runs at 55 FPS.
LOD pass on all Foliage and Rocks:
I went through the tedious process of going through each plant and reducing the polycount as much as possible without harming visuals for every LOD level, and adjusting when things begin to billboard, as well as tweaking the colors of any billboards that didn't match the color of their original object well.
I bumped up the up the max view distance for some foliage so you can see it farther away, just probably billboarding when it's far off.
Foliage Shaders Simplified:
A major part of the process of getting the dense forest up from 24 FPS to 55 in the editor was reducing the complexity of the shaders on plants. Most unreal shaders out of the box have lots of configuration like color, contrast, brightness, saturation.
I made custom copies of these shaders and eliminated the config that adds additional math every frame and instead made any changes at the texture level to reduce the work the GPU has to do.
(Some of these even had complex Power math just to apply config.)
An additional surprisingly huge chunk of performance was gained by building the game in shipping mode instead of development mode, but stuff like the console and debugging is now stripped out.
Bugfixes:
BG Music not starting if you skip the intro fixed.
Final Thoughts:
After all is said and done my FPS in the packaged build of the game on Epic with a 3080 TI went from ~42-50 FPS standing in the beginning area looking at the dense forest, to ~57-74 FPS.