Monday!!!

As we rolled forward with our pre-Beta review, we encountered more inexplicable stuff done a few years ago. To fully explain what was going on, I have to go into a bit of back-end stuff.

Ya see: the world of Peace Island is broken up into sectors - such as the one you see above on the left. Each of these sectors is made up of a collection of smaller, baked objects.

“Baking” is a process by which we reduce many objects and textures into singular entities, so we can reduce the number of items the engine has to keep track of in every frame.  This is a practice that is good for localized objects such as houses.

However, not so much for objects such as the one on the right. For some reason, all of those objects (which constitute a majority of the polygons in that sector) were baked into a single, huge object that spanned the entire sector!

That meant that if a cat got even CLOSE to a single curb on the edge of that sector, the engine would have to start tracking that ENTIRE object- even though a majority of it would always be out of the cats’ range of vision.

After fixing this, we reduced the average polygon count in the downtown sectors by almost 25% with a commensurate improvement in frame rates!

In the process, we discovered a few other ways that a few hundred calls can be removed, along with perhaps another quarter-million polys over the next week- ya see:

We will be releasing a new version of the game to our playtesters on May 15th.  We were planning on releasing it at the start of May, but our failed conversion to URP cost us a few days.

We also want to bring in our animator for one last gig: fixing the “run-jump.”  Currently, the cat makes a quick crouch/pause before run-jumping, which brings the cat to a complete stop for a half-second.   This is not only unnatural, but it also disturbs the flow of movement.  

Anyone who owns a cat knows how fluidly a cat in full flight transitions between running & jumping. We want to give the player that same fluid motion control.

In addition, we brought in the new ocean system- this was something we had planned on for a few months, but were always stymied by bugs.  The previous version was not compatible with our skybox, so this was just another box to check, really…

Lance has continued his work on systems/controller, and Laura has continued her work on the skybox/atmospherics.  Now that we have the new ocean- we want to make the sunsets reflect off the waves just so...

The rest for me, personally:

1: Finish the review of the bug reports (figure 3 days)
2: Finalize the Beta foliage (2-3 days)
3: Finalize the Beta dialogue UI (1-2 days)
4: Fix the intro Animatic (1-2 days)

Considering that every day’s development currently has the pace of the second half of Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat”, it’s hard to say where I’ll be heading after point four - I guess we’ll touch base again, next week.

Sorry we don't have more screenshots as promised, this week - consodilating baked objects turns out to be the gamedev equivalent of moving heavy boxes.

And yeah- I found an afternoon to take off for my birthday - I sat and watched the sun set from here:

Thanks again so much for your patience, confidence, and support!