Hi all!
Uf! Quite a month behind us! Full of chaos. Things that have effected our life in the past weeks:
We're parents now, so 50% of the development team is currently fully occupied with a new project dictated by a new manager while the other 50% of the team is struggling to put in some work here and there.
A water pipe started leaking in our bedroom walls so we had to tear the wall apart and replace it, which was not a great timing having a newborn at home.
For some reason our internet connection stopped working for a week. 4 technicians visited our apartment stating their opinions and in the end replacing 3 modems and 6 cables.
Luckily we're developing the game as a fun free time project and we're not tied to any deadlines. Only the ones that we set ourselves.
For all reasons stated above we adjusted our to do list a bit and paused the UI development - probably for the next few months (this is on the mother's to do list). The focus (as much as was left) was now shifted to performance optimization. We knew we would have to tackle this at some point but have been laying it off as it is well known that 'premature optimization is the root of all evil'. It was identified that most performance issues are graphics related. We've taken the following approaches in optimizing it:
Simplifying complex meshes lowering the number of tris that need to be rendered.
Introducing LODs for complex objects and often occurring objects like rocks, grass etc.
Reshaping the terrain in some parts of the map to occlude the player's view - that way fewer objects need to be rendered in those critical areas.
Testing these modifications in a part of the map we've gained around 30fps in the most critical areas so we'll try to apply these first to the demo area and then to the whole map. Might take some time with the current pace but we'll get there.
Wherever you are enjoy the month of September!
M&V