Hello everyone,
This month has been a busy and exciting month.
Publishing
We have exciting news to share, we have teamed up with the publisher Perp Games!
They are a good fit for us as they focus on horror/atmospheric titles, and they are supportive of the vision and plans in place for Retchid. We're happy to be working with such an amazing publisher!
Optimisation
We are pretty happy with how the GPU optimisation turned out, there isn't much left to do other than minor tweaks in the levels and maybe an LOD here and there.
We opened the hood and had a stab at profiling and adjusting the CPU side of optimisations across various aspects from the AI, skeletal mesh use, weapons, HUD, and any actors that seemed to be costing too many milliseconds.
Skeletal meshes are always being processed, regardless of if being rendered or not. Since we use ragdolls for our dead bodies throughout the levels (which can be up to 50+ dead bodies), so we put in some fixes to stop the skeletal from being processed on the AI and dead bodies, which gave good amounts of FPS, up to 30% in some levels, depending on your CPU/GPU.
Some AI components were always being processed even though the AI wasn't active like the movement and the meshes. We optimised it a little bit for now to they don't tick until they are active and they stop ticking when they are dead, there is still some refactoring to do there in the future
Weapon systems over all had some tweaks, we realised that all the weapons are always "there" at once so we're going to refactor that in the future to optimise that as well.
The HUD had a few place holder systems that were moved to event based updates instead of tick, this helped save a few MS of processing.
An on going thing is collision optimisation so we took a look at a bunch of models to see where we can get some minor gains there, for example if the object is simple we use the box collision for the simple and complex collision, which is used by weapons for hit detection. And turning some collisions in to query only instead of physics and query.
Over all it was a nice first pass, and there are some more gains to get in the future.
We always poke a stick at keeping the game optimised as we work so we don't have to pull out all the wires at the end and figure everything out all at once.
Game Art
All the episode 3 props that are small and fragile enough looking had breakable parts made for them. If you enjoy breaking pots, you're gonna have a fun time in episode 3!
The physics push on explosions has also been tweaked to make stuff fly away more forcefully as well.
The thoughts room (save room) for episode 3 also got a small update to make the space bigger and a bit more interesting.
Game Logic
This month we got all our episode 3 supporting puzzle components built and in to the levels, they compliment the existing main puzzles in the levels.
- Rotating stones where you have to match the symbols
- a multi-ring door where you have to use switches to rotate each ring to line up the symbols
- A system where you have to shoot or push buttons in order
- Pushable stone blocks where you have to push the stone block on the correct pressure plate
Thanks for reading
-FBS Team