Edengrall News

Changes:
Improved the performance of the tree leaf shader
Made the bamboo LOD more agressive

Bugfixes:
Fixed the game not working if the grass setting was set to None

Features:
Added GPU based Depth Occlusion to most GPU intensive objects
Added LOD for critters

Changes:
Improved the config screen sliders
Increased fishing attack max range

This little detour to optimize the game a bit sure took some time, but at least we got pretty decent results, the only thing we didn't manage to optimize was the tree leafy shader which will take more extra effort and maybe two more weeks, so we have decided to finish up the current optimizations and bugfix to release a new build.

There are one or two bugs (that we identified) left, so the update will be up soon, probably on the sunday if there aren't more bugs.

Now that the game runs better we started to think of other problems to solve, one of the worst being the current crop system and the mess of seedstacks you have to manage to do crop selection, so we have decided on a more radical solution, after we finish the tree update, we will delay the survival mechanics to bring in a crop perk overhaul.

Crop perks will no longer be random, there will no longer be negative perks and the maximum amount of seed stacks for each crop in your inventory will be 6 (zero star seeds, and 1 to 5 star seeds).

We will do it by making each crop a skill, leveling up this skill by harvesting the crop will grant perk points at fixed intervals, and you will be able to spend these perk points choosing the perks you want, making a build for each crop.

The perks will no longer be saved on the seeds, but on your character instead (there will be a new UI for that) and the seeds will only carry the potential to unlock the choosen perks based on their tier, for example, a 3 star Turnip seed will have access to up to tier 3 perks, even if you have maxed the Turnip skill and have choosen 5 star perks in the UI, the Turnips you plant will still require a 5 star seed to access these high level perks.



Crops will have exclusive and generic perks, the generic perks are often slightly weaker, but they are flexible, once learned they be can placed into other crops, so you could take a Turnip generic perk and apply it to a Potato, giving a big incentive to the player to try different crops,

This will also open the window to unique perks that can be unlocked in different ways like exploration or by winning festival competitions in the future.

Good news, the optimization effort bore fruit this time, we are getting a solid FPS bump in almost every part of the town.



Bad news, we are getting a crash now sometimes and there are other small bugs, so until we can figure out what is happening we can't release a new update.

This took a whole rewrite of the grass shader draw algorithm, but it was worth, it was also something we would have to do eventually for the map expansion anyways.

On the critter optimizations other than a few exceptions that are not worth optimizing they are all done, and I have now began working on the fish.

This is a short report, optimization is boring, but necessary.

When we get a stable Beta I will announce it and we will be requesting beta testers to be sure the new GPU depth culling is not failing on some random GPUs.

Critters can now spawn on trees, for now only a few geckos (Including the new Tokay Gecko) and beetles are being added to the trees, we will add more later.



Beehives now spawn bees that wander and then return to the hive, making the precious hives even easier to spot.

We have figured what caused the problems with the previous optimization attempt, while it did reduce the number of objects being rendered it caused a huge number of critters to spawn by accidentally removing a population cap, this will be fixed on the next patch.

In addition to the optimizations my brother is doing I have began making LOD models for all critters, reducing the number of polygons being rendered at all times. These two changes will greatly increase performance on the next patch.

We expect to release it sometime mid next week.