Hey everyone, I hope you're doing well!
I worked a lot on optimizing performance and fixing visual issues this week.
I've also been testing the game on one of my 10+ year-old PCs (that is well below the game's minimum requirements). It was running the game at around 30 FPS on the lowest visual quality settings initially, and with this week's performance upgrades, it now runs the game at a steady 50 FPS. The work is not completely done, but that should make the game available to more people. I'll keep the minimum requirements on the Steam page as a GTX 1060 + 8GB RAM + i7-6800K for now, but we may be able to lower them eventually, and make the performance much better on most computers!
Also, here are the improvements/fixes that made it into this week's demo update (v0.8.11):
-Fixed an issue that was happening on some older generation GPUs (GeForce 900) and onboard GPUs where the water was pitch black. It took me quite some time to find the issue this weekend, as it ended up being a visual conflict between the game's cloud system and the underwater effects, who would have guessed haha. For those interested, one of the most important thing when fixing an issue in the code is to find how to reproduce it on your development computer, so you can test the fix. As this issue only happened on specific hardware (mostly GeForce 900 generation), I was lucky to find a very cheap GTX 970 (2014 GPU) on ebay, and I installed it in one of my older PCs. I was so happy when I saw that it reproduced the issue, with the water being pitch black. That allowed me to test different fixes. I'm very glad it worked, as that will make the game available to a wider range of PCs. Thanks to the players who reported this issue :)
-Added an option to turn off shadows (in the graphics quality dropdown)
-Added a dropdown to control the number of schools of fish that appear around the player (full, sparse, and none), as they require a bit of processing power (with 70+ fish per school, having 4 school of fish on screen at the same time may keep your CPU/GPU busy haha)
-Added a dropdown to turn volumetric clouds on/off
-Fixed an issue where the ground and object brightness was flickering on some specific PCs
-Increased the material requirements of some shelter upgrades to improve gameplay pacing
-Changed the color of the first water-resistant suit to better match the required materials
-Made the bed icon color brighter to make it more visible when the player has all the required ingredients
-Increased the sky brightness from 4000 to 5000 lumens to make the islands area feel warmer
-Increased the size of top left popups to make them more visible
That's it for this week's update :)