This update has a little bit of everything and a lot of internal testing went into it. This came a lot later than I was hoping it would, but as a full time student and the sole programmer for the project it's a bit difficult. As for the updates, I'll list some of them below.
Visual updates:
- Hedges were remade
- Grass was remade
- Some lighting and particles were updated
- Textures were updated to look more consistent
Gameplay/QOL:
- FOV and Gamma sliders were added to the settings menu
- Particles were added that trail the players in order to make navigating explored areas a little bit less annoying
- A few items were changed and a better functioning "quest list" was added to give more clarity on what to do in certain situation
- AI changes and a completely reworked death/ capture mechanic that feels more grounded in the world, but can still look somewhat cinematic
Optimization:
- The hedges and Grass change also fits here as the new foliage has a much lower poly count, besides just looking better, and really helps performance.
- A lot of the structures were either remade or tweaked to lower poly count and help with occlusion. This also had a large performance boost.
- Materials and textures were re-designed to lessen draw calls and reduce memory usage.
- Most of the code was went through and optimized further to reduce the weight on the CPU which should help frames.
There are more changes that have likely slipped my mind when making these lists and there were definitely A TON of bugs that took most of the time fixing. With that said there are probably more bugs hidden in there that we were just unable to find so feedback is still very much welcomed and encouraged. Thank you guys for all the feedback so far and apologies for the super late update. Another update will come soon in the form of a progress update on the second level.