DEV BITES #03

Dev Bites - Issue Three

Welcome to our issue three of Dev Bites! We hope everyone had an enjoyable break over the winter holidays. After a short festive break ourselves, the team are back on the project getting ready for our next update. In this Dev Bite, we’ll cover some of the changes we’re already making and what to expect in the next major update.

Overview

• Difficulty system
  
• Steam Deck
  
• Intel® Arc™ & XeSS support
  
• Church update
  
• Bug fixes
  
• Performance
  
• RTX situation
  
• New animations and timed interactions
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]Difficulty System[/h2]
Our roster of core game systems is nearly complete with only a few exceptions. Top of the list of missing features is a difficulty system, allowing players to adjust the difficulty of the game to their liking - both easier and harder.



Our new difficulty system will allow hosts in the lobby to either select a base difficulty ranging from Easy to Nightmare or they can simply tweak the system to totally customize each game session modifying:

• Healthkit spawns
  
• Healing time
  
• Self-Revive kits
  
• Revive time
  
• Looting
  
• Flashlight
  
• Escape plans
  
• AI
  
• Crawl spaces
  
• Obstacles
  
• Storms
  
• Weather Health
  
• Traps
  
• Minigames
  
• And more…
  
• 
  

More customisation settings will be added to the game as we go forward. Players will be able to select which map and Sanguivore they want to play with as well, as the game grows beyond the first map.

[h2]Steam Deck[/h2]


We have good news for Steam Deck users! It has long been our intention to get the game running on the Steam Deck. Tests on early builds showed issues with performance and common crashes. However, we’re pleased to announce that many of these problems have been overcome in our latest internal build and will be available with the next update.



In our settings menu, we have a Steam Deck preset which allows users to select settings best suited to the hardware. In our latest internal test (without various optimizations available) we were able to achieve 40-60FPS. As we introduce more optimisations, we expect this average will become more consistent.

There are some specific things causing the frame rate to drop at the moment. The fluid simulations from the Noble entering and exiting cause some notable drops for example. We are currently working on some alternative effects which will allow the framerate to remain stable. This is work in progress, but we are looking to have this ready for the next patch.

Currently the latest version of Proton is required to play on the Steam Deck, but we will be looking to try and make a Sanguivore native Linux version of the game in the near future as well.

Processor Unit: AMD Zen2 2.4-3.5Ghz
Ram: 16Gb DDR5
Storage: NVMe SSD
GPU: AMD Equivalent:- Radeon RX 6700xt
nVidia Equivalent:- GTX 1060 / RTX 2060

Steam Deck Technical Information: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/tech

[h2]Intel® Arc™ & XeSS Support[/h2]


In further hardware support news for Sanguivore, most Intel GPUs are made for laptops, but their new brand of the Intel® Arc™ 7 series cards seems to be competitive with the budget GPUs by nVidia. For example, sources show us that the Intel® Arc™ 7 series can achieve 93FPS over nVidia’s RTX3060ti which runs at 88FPS on Rockstar’s Red Dead 2.

Source: https://t.ly/TAsyx [DigitalTrends.com]

So as we aim to support as much hardware out there on the market as possible, we are considering how to best support newer GPUs. So to accomplish this, Sanguivore now supports XeSS AI supersampling by Intel. This is basically Intel's version of AMD's FSR or nVidia's DLSS. While testing XeSS, it does seem to work for nVidia hardware, but will lower visual quality to the native DLSS 3.5.

Documentation: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discrete-gpus/arc/technology/xess.html

[h2]Church Update[/h2]
Our 3D Modeler has been hard at work breathing new life into the church in the second section. The repairs to the church roof is important to the story of why there is construction equipment in the area. One problem though - there doesn’t appear to be any damage to the roof. Until now!



The majority of meshes we use are set to utilize Unreal Nanite, a rendering technique for getting extremely high polycounts on meshes, including the new church roof.



Skipping ahead slightly to some future development for the church, our changes aren’t entirely visual either. We’re aware that getting from one side of the section to the other can be quite a journey. With the new church spire, we’ll be adding a fast way down with the use of a handy zipline. More details to come in the future with this new feature.

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]
Since returning after the New Year, there has been a general focus of clearing off as many known issues as possible, with a view to having a good clean start to the year. We started off by reprioritising our known issues in the hopes of tackling any major problems first.

Progress on this front has been positive. Some notable examples include a slew of issues relating to the scoreboard and various issues causing the game to lock up when using hiding places.

We’re also hearing feedback from multiple sources regarding AI balance. The common thread is that the AI hangs around players too much. To address this, we’ve rebalanced the Noble so that he spreads out his movement pattern further, while still having plenty of capacity to have an encounter with the player.

Additionally, several improvements have been made to the Fledgling’s vision. There were issues where they could attempt to get to players hiding under houses. Despite not having access, they would loiter by the houses indefinitely. With their latest sensory update, they will now rapidly ignore inaccessible targets, such as people hiding under houses.

The balance of the AI’s perception is still being investigated and will continue to be balanced until it feels just right. Follow the next update, feedback on this subject will be much appreciated!

[h2]Performance[/h2]
We’ve made good headway with a couple of important performance updates. Some major optimizations have been done affecting popup UI elements. The changes have had a fairly major improvement on CPU performance. This was the main cause of the framerate dropping when looking in different directions around the police station.

Additionally, we have finished a general cleanup of levels in the game. This process helps ensure that only assets that need to be loaded in are actually loaded in at the right times, preventing any overhead from objects that cannot be seen.

Our in-game settings have been spruced up too. In addition to various quality of life improvements for the settings, a new benchmark tool has been added to automatically identify the best settings for your hardware. You will have the option to run the benchmark tool after first launching the game and is also available in the settings.

[h2]RTX Situation[/h2]
We spent some time looking into some of the graphical issues surrounding RTX Ray Tracing. We’ve discovered several anomalies ranging from mild to severe that we want to try and fix when possible. However, just at the moment, fixing these RTX-related graphical issues is not our main focus. We have therefore decided that it would be best to disable RTX features for now, until we have the time to fully address the associated issues. Apologies for any disruption for RTX users - it will be back as soon as we can get it working properly.

[h2]New animations and timed interactions.[/h2]
In line with the addition of new difficulty settings, we’re looking to make some interesting updates to how players interact with objects in the world.

We’re putting together a series of new animations covering the majority of interactions in the game. Examples include typing at the computer when using it, handling fuses in and out of the fusebox and squeezing through tight gaps etc.



This is not only to make the whole gameplay experience better and more engaging but will also introduce the new timed event system, where each task will take time to complete and may require multiple attempts to get an item working.

Lets take PCs for example:- Currently a single button press can reveal a code required for a secure area. With the new system a number of timed key presses may be required to solve a puzzle on the PC to access the machine's content.

This will also bring inline the plans we have for selected player characters and player perks that will be available to players. For example, a hacking perk to make accessing PCs easier.



The inclusion of new animations allows players to visually see what other players are doing in the world.

Furthermore, new animations mean that certain actions may take a little time to complete. This interaction time can now be integrated with the difficulty system so that certain activities are either faster or slower depending on difficulty.


Looking beyond this next update, we are excited to make further headway with the third section. Much of the third section has already been worked on, but we are now getting closer to being in a position to finish the remaining parts. Since many of the core systems are now in place, we can dedicate much more time to working on the sections themselves.

Optimisations, fixes, quality of life improvements and balance changes will all continue as needed.

[h2]Next Patch[/h2]
Similarly to the last time we did a Dev Bite, internal testing on the latest build is underway. We are looking to release an update on Friday if possible. In case of any last minute hold ups, we’ll look to be ready with a new update around the start of next week. Stay tuned for news on the next update!