Optimize optimize optimize!
Thats all its been for the last week. I have spent days hunting down various cpu and gpu drains in the game to address judder or frame rate issues. I made a massive improvement by reworking the thruster lights. Turns out if you modulate intensity of a light in Unity, the GPU loses its chill, but if you simply adjust the range of a light, it doesn't make a dent to performance. Even slowly rotating a "Sun" like light in a scene absolutely kills performance. That all being said, I have gained an extra 10-15 fps and reduced a lot of judder in certain scenarios. If you are still having judder issues on high spec machines, please don't tell me about it unless you want to see a grown man cry.
I also discovered that if your audiolistener is violently shaked in your game, there is a performance cost as I believe it has issues calculating the doppler effect. If the listener is parented to something like a physics object that is being motivated by something else, the GPU loses around 6-8 ms. I haven't found a way around this yet, but there is room to improve.
Also, I have added an "Instant Race" menu item which puts you into a randomly selected map that you have unlocked. For the moment, I stick you with the basic Hopper, but I will be adding more custom skimmers in the future. Its just a test to see if it works or not. You can earn a fixed amount of money based on the difficulty.
Total updates include:
I will be updating this game one more time before going on holiday June 12th to July 15th. I am off to Ireland to get married to my amazing lead play tester, Claire, who I proposed to last year after PAX Aus. Laptops are not allowed, so I hope to make as many improvements to this build as I can before then.
Once again, thanks for your patronage and please give the game a stellar review. I am always open to your feedback.
-Ryan