Back again...
There been a period of silence for quite sometime regarding the updates for Chickens Madness, but that was for a very strong reasons..There are a ton happening right now behind the screens for Chickens Madness, and for Vikong in general, and will discuss that on time. But here is the good thing,... finally managed to put together a once more a major update for the game.
What you expect after getting this update?
Well, not much,....But a lot in fact!
Content
The entire game content been reworked, not remade, but reworked and re-organized, and optimized in a better way. So while this mean there isn't any new content been added to the game, but...Well,...a more tiny game size...Yup!! that is happening once more..If you can recall an old update (Update #3 -- Build[1.5a-SmallerChickenBox]) the game managed to make it after a lot of hard work, from over 2 GB to almost half that size. But during the following updates in the past year, the game started to grow again few hundreds of megabytes due to the new content and parties. But that never been a satisfying note to take as a developer. So I did put in mind to take a pause, and re-consider a lot of things within Chickens Madness as a game project that has thousands of files, and that was mostly the core task for this update.
The original goal was to take the game again back to the same size we ended up with during the update #3, but not long time since I started in that task, and my hopes changed to totally go beyond that goal, and now the orientation is to take the game to the smallest package size possible at the meantime! And try as much as possible to make it as small as possible for such a game that has a wide range of models, animations,...etc with high quality console/HD ready-assest. That will be super useful in load time, and in a smoother experience for the less capable computers.
The outcome for that epic reworking task of the entire project files, was a total of near 850 MB zipped game file (the one uploaded to steam, and the one you download before it get unzipped to your common folder) instead of 1.4 GB from the last update (or instead of 1.2 GB from update #3)
Experience
There been as always some performance optimization tricks to implement in the game, where most of it won't affect you if you running on a beast PC, but that will be super useful for other players who have complains from using less powerful cards.
The most important one to mention, is the running/racing party, this party for a long time been using a very naive method to render all the players into a single screen, which was a huge cause for a very noticeable low framerate during this party among the entire game parties. This implementation been re-worked, TOTALLY from scratch, and the game now having a very optimized way that can grantee a solid and stable high framerate while playing this racing party.
This previous screenshot is from the previous implementation that you were able to experience till the last update. You can see the "pixelation" at some areas of the screen, the very wide camera angle & the super dense-like green fog, all those technique was there to minimize the framerate issues in the method used to render the final composed splitscreen, and was not even enough to get good fps...
This is a screenshot form this update, you will notice a very clean quality that match the rest of the game. No dense thick fog and no pixelation at tires round edges, and overall super nice and sharp edges with a good color blend in the background that match the rest of the game...And after all that, a good framerate without a single drop!
V.