Cowboy Life Simulator News

Howdy partners!

Today we want to showcase our brand new VFX! We decided to finally update them, and honestly, we love them. Right now we mostly have animal-related ones, but there is also a cactus and smoke of absolute deception. Enjoy!

1. Animal reactions

They show up when animals react to their surroundings and states, like sleeping, eating or being herded. The icons were hand-drawn on a cardboard-like texture and animated in Unreal Engine’s particle system, Niagara. We wanted to make them look as if the Cowboy himself scribbled them carelessly, without any fancy tools (let alone skills). We love the new update – they give out a cozy, homely vibe!


2. Smokescreen of Deception

Some of the inner workings of our game aren't exactly, uh, visually appealing. To combat this, we use a little trick called Smokescreen (it is not called that, we made it up). We use it in many different places. Here you can see the quest with Ruff Raymond, where the shooting range appears. Poof!


3. Cactus juice

The cacti no longer bleed when being cut down! (Yeah, they used to do that. But now we un-placeholdered that!) It now has this beautiful, green juice splashing out of it. Not cardboard-like this time, we aimed for a little bit more realistic look with this one. They look way better now. Made using simple hand-drawn textures and some Niagara magic!


4. The “Howdy Exclamation Point”

We also recently coded this feature where if an NPC has something you could talk to them about, an exclamation point appears over their head. For some time we had a simple placeholder icon there, but look a this new one – also hand-drawn, and also in that cute style that the animals and smoke have!


So what do you think? Don’t hesitate to reach out, comment, suggest, or share a laugh! Follow us and shoot us a message at our X (well, Twitter...) – @OddQubit. We’d also love to have you over on our growing Discord server – here’s the [link]. Happy trails, friend.

[h2]Wishlist “Cowboy Life Simulator” today![/h2]

[p]Howdy, partners![/p][p]We’ve just wrapped up the playtest for Cowboy Life Simulator and we want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated. Your time, feedback, and bug reports are incredibly valuable to us.[/p][p]From cozy ranch building to epic Wild West adventures, we’ve seen players dive deep into the world we’re creating – and your insights are already shaping the next steps of development.[/p][p][/p][p]🛠️ What’s next?[/p][p]
We’re now hard at work implementing improvements based on what you’ve told us – from performance tweaks to gameplay balance, quality-of-life fixes, and new features you’ve suggested.[/p][p][/p][p]💬 We read every comment and survey – and we’re prioritizing the changes that matter most to you.[/p][p][/p][p]Stay tuned – we’ll be sharing updates, sneak peeks, and developer insights as we get closer to release. Until then…[/p][p]Thank you for being part of our journey. The West is in good hands.[/p][p]– The Cowboy Life Simulator Team[/p]

[p]Howdy, Cowboys!
We’re getting real close to the release of Cowboy Life Simulator – and before we let you ride off into the Wild West, we’ve got one last chance for you to saddle up and test the game before launch.[/p][p]That’s right: Final Playtests are live![/p][p]This is your last opportunity to:[/p][p][/p]

• [p]Build and manage your ranch from the ground up[/p]
• [p]Experience the early chapters of your cowboy journey[/p]
• [p]Share feedback – every insight helps us improve the game before release[/p][p][/p]

[hr][/hr][p][/p][p]🎮 How to Join?[/p][p]
Just hit the “Request Access” button on the game’s Steam page:[/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][hr][/hr][p]Thanks for being part of the journey and sharing your thoughts.
We can’t wait to see how you build your frontier life.[/p][p]See you on the ranch,
The Cowboy Life Simulator Team[/p][p][/p][p]DISCORD[/p][p][/p][p][/p]

[h2]Howdy, partners![/h2][p][/p][p]After a few years of development, we are getting closer and closer to release! Therefore, we wanted to share with you our favorite bugs in Cowboy Life Simulator, and how we managed to fix them. Sometimes, bugs are annoying, but at other times they can bring a smile to your face after hours of hard work.

Here they are, in no particular order. We brought pics and we brought gifs.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Absolutely Enormous Crops [/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We were changing the way crops update in size over time – plants’ scale gets updated as they age. Because of the system change, the plant scale was absolutely enormous, so during spawn we were setting the mesh scale to some absurd values. After fixing the scale, crops are no longer so giant (but what a blast it was, for a time).[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Bandit Monstrosity
[/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p]This cursed God-knows-what is connected to combat. Our bandits at one point would just kind of do whatever this is whenever they got shot. Yeah.[/p][p]
[/p][h3]You Cannot Sit Here![/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]That was a recurring problem. Let’s be honest, anyone even remotely familiar with making games knows what a pain NPCs and their AIs are.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Slice of Cow
[/h3][p][/p][p]One of us, while testing a quest, decided to see what would happen if they shot a cow not belonging to them. The effect? The cow’s body would get sliced with every shot. The cow? Unphased.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Mr. Hen Head[/h3][p][/p][h3][/h3][p]We got the animal-buying panel and the inventory panel a little mixed up. Peak Wild West fashion though.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Mysterious Explosion[/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p]
To be honest, we still do not know what happened there. Nobody has seen it either before or again, and the only person who ever was able to capture it was our Project Lead, while filming something completely unrelated. Maybe you will be the one to witness it again?[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Right Round…[/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This character you’re seeing here has a very custom way of moving, as she’s a wheelchair user. We kind of forgot about that when implementing the way NPCs are to move between different actionpoints.[/p][p][/p][h3]Cow Boogie[/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We were implementing some new animal animations. During the import a message showed up, saying that the rig bones used on the imported mesh and rig bones on the skeletal mesh linked to it are mismatched. It asked if we wanted to change it, so (obviously) we clicked “yes”.[/p][p][/p][p]Well, that was a mistake – nearly every cow animation imploded. Thankfully, during further tweaks, we managed to reset the local rotation of the mesh. Finally, reverting the import and fixing the skeletons outside the engine helped.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Ruff Getting Folded Like Fresh Sheets[/h3][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This one was connected to combat, and how bandits are to fall when killed. However, we applied this mechanic to every kind of NPC by accident, not only bandits… Yikes. Heatstroke from the Wild West sun?[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]A Truly Startling Bandit Ambush[/h3][p][/p][h3][/h3][p][/p][p]I mean, your head can start spinning from a sudden adrenaline rush, but this much…?[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]So what do you think? Don’t hesitate to reach out, comment, suggest, or share a laugh! Follow us and shoot us a message at our Instagram – @odd.qubit. We’d also love to have you over on our growing Discord server – here’s the \[link]. Happy trails, friend.
[/p][h2]Wishlist “Cowboy Life Simulator” today![/h2]

[h2]Howdy, partners![/h2]

Every game starts rough. At first, we’re focused on gameplay and visuals, not performance. It’s all prototypes, heavy assets, wild ideas… and suddenly, it’s running at 15 FPS. Yep, we’ve been there too. But now we’re on a mission to hit 60.

We optimize two big areas: CPU, meaning game logic, collisions, movement, AI, and GPU, so everything visual.

Optimization means finding smarter ways to do things and cutting what’s too heavy.


[h3]Farewell, Nanite[/h3]

Early on, we were thrilled about Nanite, Unreal Engine 5’s fancy rendering tech that lets you use ultra-detailed models. But as our world filled up, problems piled on: stutters, memory spikes, performance dips... We ran a ton of tests and eventually accepted the truth: Nanite just wasn’t the right fit for our game.

So we cut it. Maybe we’ll get back to it in our next game? It worked wonders in Expedition 33, but our guess is that projects really need a Nanite-oriented approach from the get-go.




Nanite triangle visualisation of the main street in our town, Bravestand.
Anything black is not nanite – the colorful ones are. You can see how the triangles change when you get closer.


💡further reading: "What is Nanite?"



[h3]Draw Calls, LODs, and Distant Tree Drama[/h3]

In an open world, managing draw calls is crucial. Each one is a command to the GPU to render something. We fight the flood with mesh instancing, meaning 100 identical trees are grouped together under a single draw call, and HLODs (Hierarchical Level of Detail), which simplify faraway stuff into chunky geometry.

We also rely heavily on LODs — simpler versions of objects used at a distance. Auto-generated ones usually work, but Unreal struggles with things like trees, often dropping entire branches. Our artist is currently handcrafting tree LODs to fix that.




Visualisation of the changing LODs of the train tracks and nature around them.




Visualisation of the density of the triangles in certain spots.


💡further reading: "Polycount, Optimization and Draw Calls"



[h3]Lighting on a Leash[/h3]


We use fully dynamic lighting, which looks great but hits performance hard. Most games bake lighting (pre-render it), but we wanted a real-time sun, beautiful mornings, and picturesque sunsets.

To keep it manageable, we reduced light precision and added a graphics setting so players can choose how often the sun moves to best suit the might of their machines.




Visualisation of lighting of a scene, in this case the town of Bravestand from a different angle.
The orange blobs signify overlaps of light coming from different light sources, which is more costly performance-wise.



💡further reading: "Lighting the Environment"



[h3]CPU: Simpler Collisions, Smarter Code[/h3]


First target? Collisions. And by collisions, we don’t mean just bumping into stuff – this concept includes overlaps and big trigger volumes: checking if animals are in their homes and if NPCs are at a certain location.

We simplified them to spheres, capsules, and boxes – as little complex shapes as possible. Most moving objects either have no real collision, or we fake it. Why? Because checking for hits and overlaps constantly drains CPU.




Visualisation of the collisions of different objects at the Saloon in town.
The bottles, for example, have spherical collisions.


💡further reading: "How to Optimize Collision Performance"



[h3]Data Loads and Animal AI[/h3]


Our world runs on big databases for animals, plants, and buildings. And in the case of buildings, every single module is a separate entry, and some buildings have dozens of modules! Pulling data was slow, but our backend dev sprinkled some magic and sped things up — though it’s still a work in progress.

We’re also refining NPCs and animals, which are complex due to animation, AI, collisions, and skeletal meshes. For example, animals and characters have 5fps animations when you’re not looking. ;)

We keep tweaking their behavior logic to make them smarter and leaner.
To track what’s slowing us down, we use the Unreal Insights tool.




Our main investigation tool for diving deep into optimization issues – the Unreal Insights graph.