🛠️ Devlog #02: Culling and Memory Management

Hello everyone!

Following up on our last technical update, our internal alpha testing phase has shifted into overdrive. Over the past few days, we ran the simulation through its absolute worst-case scenario: pushing the club to maximum guest and staff capacity while maintaining aggressive, asynchronous NavMesh AI traffic.

When you throw over 450 dynamic agents into a highly detailed club environment, you don't just test the gameplay - you push the hardware to its limits. Here is how we dismantled our biggest performance bottlenecks and secured our rock-solid 120 FPS target.

👻 Demystifying the "Ghost in the Machine" (Frustum & Occlusion Culling)

During a brutal stress test with 452 active customers, we noticed a massive, sudden frame rate drop in specific angles of the VIP Room. Thanks to our deep performance profiling tools, we uncovered a wild Unity 6 rendering anomaly: our camera was technically "seeing" through solid 1m-thick concrete walls.

Even though players could only see about 30 people in their immediate field of view, the GPU was actively processing over 270 neghboring Skinned Mesh Renderers and an astronomical 14 Million polygons from the main dancefloor down the hall!

• The Surgical Fix: We manually rewrote the initialization pipeline for our dynamic Rocketbox models. By injecting allowOcclusionWhenDynamic = true and updateWhenOffscreen = false directly via code, we forced the engine to respect our static occlusion zones.
• The Result: Visible meshes instantly dropped from 271 to a pristine 41 in tight angles, slashing our polygon count by over 10 Million triangles and restoring our flawless performance.

💡 "Baked is Holier" - Refining the Club’s Ambiance

Our optimization drive didn’t stop at geometry. We realized that calculating real-time shadows for hundreds of dancing guests through multiple rooms was an expensive luxury that muffled our VRAM.

• Smart Lights: We completely disabled real-time shadow casting on moving spotlights across Dance Rooms 1 and 2. Since the floors are covered in dense volumetric club fog, complex soft shadows were visually lost anyway.
• The Spotlight Treatment: Real-time hard shadows are now strictly reserved for our main stage performers and hero DAZ models, ensuring they remain the absolute focal points of the club with zero unnecessary GPU overhead.
• A 3-Minute Bake: We recalibrated our Lightmap resolution down to a perfect 20 texels per unit and capped our textures at 2048x2048. This completely eliminated a bizarre "stadium lighting leakage" bug in the back hallways, cleared out old GiCache corruption, and let our RTX setup bake the entire 15,000 m² club layout in an incredible 3 minutes and 2 seconds!

🔒 Pause Menu, Security & Single-Scene Architecture

We have officially locked down our custom in-game Pause Menu and single-scene lifecycle manager. For a tycoon simulation game, handling memory during transitions is a minefield.

• VRAM Micro-Flushing: When a player returns to the Main Menu or loads a game, we don't just destroy game objects. Our custom scripts now explicitly target procedural element generation, wiping out unmanaged textures and temporary photo-booth portraits directly from the graphics card. The Guests and Staff hierarchy groups are left surgically clean, ensuring absolutely zero memory leaks over long play sessions.
• Anti-Cheat Implementation: To protect our event-driven economy and your hard-earned decimal club cash, all local saves are now strictly encrypted using an asynchronous XOR binary filter and signed with a SHA-256 digital checksum signature. If anyone tries to manually alter their cash values using standard text editors, the system will instantly detect the file manipulation and protect the integrity of the tycoon loop.

🚀 What's Next?

Build 0.00.197 has officially rolled out to our core alpha team.
While they spend the weekend stress - testing our new culling layout and single-scene memory resets, we are officially moving on to Phase 2 of the Save/Load Architecture: building our modular, multi-page layout UI system and serializing individual worker schedules, wages and stats to the encrypted disk.

We are less than 200 days into development, and the core engine is purring like a beast.

Thank you all for the legendary support.
Make sure to smash that Wishlist button and drop your thoughts in the comments below!