Dear friends! The last couple of months I've been preparing for a new frontier in my game development. But this stage I will keep a secret for now, but it forced me to study more deeply work on optimization of games. In this regard, I have prepared a major update related to the optimization and stable operation of the game.
Since I initially optimized the performance of the game well, despite its rather high requirements at a small size, this is quite a normal load for the Unreal Engine 4, considering that I tried to use all the modern achievements in the field of graphics. The game was praised for good optimization, although there were claims that the Witcher 3 or GTA 5 work better. It has a simple explanation. I tried to use in game such receptions, which in games rarely use or not use at all, in particular I'm talking about mirrors. In" Never Again " mirrors are part of the gameplay, they are placed throughout the game and in some locations they are interactive, that is, they can be rotated, reflect rays of light or teleport. The mirror is probably the hardest thing that kills FPS in games, because it renders twice everything that happens on the stage, so it was necessary to sacrifice something else.
As a result, for my weak computer (GT740, i5) I was able to get +(5-10) FPS at the maximum level of quality. Now for me there is a stable 30fps in the game. Along with the optimization I fixed a number of old minor bugs that slightly spoiled the impression of the game and I added a few new settings.
- Each object in the game is assigned a draw distance. There wasn't this function before, because I thought that the engine does it automatically and it is not necessary in confined spaces.
- I redesigned the lighting in some locations, now the GPU load is less and looks better!
- I reworked some heavy materials. Moved simple looping animations such as swinging swings or fire glow into the material, thus the load from the CPU moved to the GPU.
- Added a few new settings:
- Ambient Occlusion is a very heavy Post Process and if you disable It you will get several FPS.
- Depth Of Field is a blur effect, which is also very heavy, turning it off will raise FPS in cut scenes, in stare mode and when viewing the diary.
- Just by popular demand in the game added Invert Camera Y and X.
- During the fall into the water from the bridge, Sasha tried to delete, on old AMD processors it led to a hang of the game for a few minutes. I could not catch this bug for a long time due to the fact that Intel coped with it. Corrected.
- The Fear of darkness remained even with the flashlight on, if you use the inhaler with the flashlight on. It was solved by switching off / on the flashlight. Not a fatal bug, but a nasty one. Corrected.
And many other small bugs that I have been quickly fixed and forgotten)
Another important thing. Finally I updated the demo. Now after its completion you can continue from the place of the last save after buying the full version of the game. Those who are just planning to purchase and played the demo version of the game can clearly assess the evolution of graphics in the game.
At the moment, there is still a lot of work on optimization and stability. There will be a number of updates in this direction. For those who have not yet purchased "Never Again", you can now go through the demo version of the game for free and join us!
Have a good game!