Thank you a lot for being patient and giving me time and trust to sort it out!
All your reports in Discussions and Discord helped a lot to narrow down the main issues with CPU performance.
it was animations!
Animation code significantly optimized using "Fast Path" technology.
Characters memory trace significantly reduced.
Game now supports approximately twice more AIs at the same time than before (!).
Adjusting GPU settings will now have much bigger impact on frames per second.
Temporal AA was adjusted to have less ghosting for moving characters.
Bonus: Tank Prototype and AI spawners are now available in the Demo too.
Technical details below.
To illustrate gains on my configuration:
To explain briefly what you see:
Game performance can be limited either by GPU or by CPU.
Debug output "Game" is responsible for CPU performance.
You can see that CPU performance was doubled on the level YARD.
That makes game butter-smooth on high end configurations and a lot more flexible for mid-range and low-end configurations.
For example, I finally can play forward_shading build on my Surface Pro 7 from 2019 on 20 fps.
Important Note:
Game might be playable on Steam Deck as well (!)
I don't have it (yet) to verify, and will make an additional pass on my side as soon as I buy it.
All this beauty was achieved by significantly reducing animation time using "Fast Path" technology.
If you want to know more technical details about it, Matthew Lake made an outstanding presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_suMyUuork
A lot of unnecessary garbage accumulated during development (that's indie development) was removed from the Character.
To explain briefly what you see:
This is character memory trace.
It represents all objects which are referenced by characters.
Main goal is to make characters more lightweight in the memory by removing unjustified references.
There is still a way to go, but the most blatant issues were mitigated, including classic curse of all modern marketplace assets (and even a meme at this stage) - 16mb cubemap in the Character's eyes reflection.
I expect a lot less limitations in the level editor for the character count.
Maps with 80 characters are now real for high end configurations.
We are getting closer and closer to Steam Deck and Multiplayer builds.
With less and less technical debt left, I have no other options apart from start adding more content and can't procrastinate ;)
Next person to receive a gift key is Barba-Q for map Liberation which helped a lot in this optimization track (there is still a work for me to do to make this map work due to how massive it is).
As usual thank you a lot for reading this far.
Try the game yourself and tell me how it changed for you in Discussions or on Discord.
Hope this article was educational and entertaining.
Stay safe!
Always yours,
Demetri