Happy Tuesday! We've got a fresh new update ready, including a major rendering optimization and a whole ton of game balancing.
Performance optimization has always been high on our list of priorities, and lately we've been doubling down in this area to alleviate some of the issues plaguing many of you. This update includes a pretty significant optimization that deals with some back-end distance culling of dynamic objects in the game. In our testing, we saw a pretty signicant reduction in object drawing cost.
On top of this, we've been working with the fine folks over at Unity to get PAMELA upgraded to the latest version of the engine. Since we rely on some custom engine code to bring PAMELA to life, this process is a bit more involved that it would be for a game running on vanilla Unity. The good news is that we've made some solid headway towards this goal, and (fingers crossed) should be able to push a live build on this new version (Unity 2018.3, specifically) in the near future. Other than benefiting from a bunch of engine bugfixes and stability improvements, we will be able to implement some awesome new features such as Texture Streaming which should net us even more performance improvements.
Aside from optimization, we're working towards the next, most meaty update of all time – the Story update. This has been a long time coming, going through multiple iterations on the drawing board, and we're as anxious as you are to get it out the door. Once we finish up some of the remaining optimization tasks and get the core foundations solidified, we'll be moving full-force onto this major update.
We want to thank everyone for their support and patience. It's heartwarming to hear from those of you who've been with us right from the beginning over a year and a half ago. Although the path to getting PAMELA 1.0 out the door hasn't been a straight line (when is it ever, in game development?) we are commited to making it happen as soon as we're possibly able.
Hope you enjoy the update! Let us know your thoughts on the balancing tweaks in the comments, and stay tuned for the next update.
Features
- Added Genesis and Nirvana themed versions of Sec-RTs
Balance & Improvements
- Implemented a rendering modification which uses more efficient distance-based rendering for dynamic objects, yielding a 20-40% reduction in amount of (unnecesary) objects drawn
- Reduced enemy senses slightly to make sneaking slightly more forgiving
- Nerfed shields slightly – recharge delay and delay penalty after overloading shield have both been increased slightly, and shield now drains slowly over time when activated
- Enemy spawn rate has been modified so that after “clearing” an area of enemies, you will have a brief window of calm before enemies start spawning back in
- Base fist melee damage has been increased slightly, with a slight reduction in knockback strength
- Added flytext to indicate a level-up
- Slightly reduced item drop rate
- Increased base thirst and hunger drop rate slightly
- Increased sprint stamina depletion rate
- Increased base NPC damage, and reduced base NPC health
Fixes
- Fixed bug with randomized weapon starter upgrades not instantiating correctly
- Fixed bug with randomized weapon durability not applying correctly
- Fixed flashlight type & description not saving correctly in some instances
- Crafted items will now (correctly) spawn with full durability
- Fixed infinite Sonar Pulse audio cue
- Fixed a dye bug in which player's dye color would affect NPC weapon color as well
- Fixed a bug in NPC pathing that prevented them from crossing doorways
- Fixed an unreachable keycard in Arcadia