Development Report 6/13/2019

Hey everyone!

Meguido here this time. Did you miss me? No? Whatever xD

This time Mr. Versus is not around basically because he had to get a temp job and is busy as hell. So now I'm taking care of everything :3

So, instead of making a long post about what I did in the past week (or since the last dev report), I'll try to make it quick and to the point.

This will be an only Bioasshard post, which is where I spent all the time recently.

As mentioned the last time, I've been reworking on the sewers, to make it look better and "faster" (in terms of loading and shader load times). First thing I did was to get rid of the actual water and replace it with a lot simpler one. I have to say this: the old one looked a lot better than this one (you can see below) but the shader complexity got reduced from 900+ to around 250 which is a lot, and you should be able to notice it in terms of framerate and the map loading times (but this specifically is something I can't be sure of, mainly because there's no place to confirm the slow loading times are due to the water shader).

Another thing I reworked is (as I mentioned like a decade ago xD) the lighting, since we deprecated the old LPV system for a better-performance baked lighting system. This, in my opinion gave it a better fit for the intended mood.

But, here comes the problem, since you noticed from previous screenshots, there seems to be a weird problem with the brightness on my monitor, where I can clearly see everything when you guys see it all dark (and yes, my monitor is in its default config xD). So I had to do a lot of testing and rebaking. Around 15 lighting bakes with around 3 and a half hours per bake took a lot of time.

You can see below the results and let me know if you can see it properly (keep in mind tho that the intended mood is for it to be a little dark but still viewable).

Another thing I did to optimize it even further is to create streaming levels. So instead of loading everything at start, it will load the stuff when it's necessary. To put it simple with an example; when you're at the beginning, where you get the hangdun and the ammo, the upper zone doesn't exist, basically because it's an useless and memory consuming part that remains off-camera until you climb up the ladder. This should make things smoother in terms of memory usage and framerate.

The last thing I've been doing (and finished) is with the new area, to add in all the foliage for the exterior zone.

And what's next you may ask? well the same I did with the previous map, which is:

streaming levels, lighting setup and bake... test and rebake if necessary.

And that's all for now... oh sh*t I ended up writting a huge wall text again ¬¬' Sorry about that.

See ya in the next report with hopefully better news (~and the return of Mr. Versus to his duties lol)

And now some screenshots (right-click and 'open image in a new window' for full-res):

(Keep in mind, this last one has no lighting built yet)