Weekly Update #10

I was hoping to get in the first medium encounter this week along with more buildings, but turning the small encounter count way up led to a massive increase in monsters, bringing up two major flaws in the game.

For one, the rock elementals which are skinned meshes, that is, mesh rigged with bones for animation, were too costly with tons of them on screen all at once. This has been remedied in tomorrow's patch using a more performant form of LOD grouping, which decreases their details the further they are from the camera. This is the first of two steps, the other being runtime batching of multiple elementals into a single render instead of each individually, but that will require a bit more work later on.

Secondly, we were saving data in all sorts of different kinds of files, each for a specific type of data. This way easy for me to manage early on, but it had a couple of problems. For one, encounter data, which includes the new monoliths, was being saved per world, instead of per "section" or "terrain". That meant that the further you traveled the bigger and bigger that data pool was growing and every-time a save was triggered it had to rewrite the entire file, often over 100mb. Now it is per terrain, only for terrains you have loaded into the world, much lighter, and compressed after saving, usually around 15-30kb when combined with resource data and others.

While working on optimizations I did a lot of system measurements and still, by far, the most performance consuming aspects of the game are the clouds and the vegetation. This week I implemented a second lower end cloud system for each weather type and reworked fog while I was in there. The new option to turn off volumetric clouds can make a big difference in FPS on some machines, so give it a try! There is currently a bug where the cloud settings are not reloading properly I hope to address tomorrow.

There is another small bug left with the current build that I hope to finish up tomorrow and publish! Once things are running faster than ever, I'll be back on track looking to turn our currently inaccessible towers into monster filled treasure packs!

Thank you to everyone on Patreon for your support!