Game Health - Optimizing your Gameplay Experience
[p]Hello Responders,[/p][p]Earlier this week we launched the first of our two game health deep dive blogposts, which focused on bugs, how we triage between different severities of bugs, and the work QA does to deliver the best quality of game for our players.[/p][p]This blogpost focus is on the work our programmers are doing to optimize the game to run at a high quality on as many rigs as possible. The EA launch version of No More Room in Hell 2 featured beautiful environments, realistic animations, and high level visual effects that really captivated players, but at a high technical cost. High level rigs were able to get the full immersive experience (most of the time) while a large number of players were stuck trying to play the game while dealing with a roller coaster FPS ride that sometimes crashed, killing responders.[/p][p]The game has come a long way from its EA launch version, but there’s a lot more opportunity for improvement before we reach our 1.0 candidate.[/p][p][/p][h3]What’s Game Performance?[/h3][p]Game performance is measured in how many frames a player sees in a second (FPS), and everything on a player's screen contributes to the weight of a frame in milliseconds (one thousandth of a second) and microseconds (one millionth of a second). If we’re looking to get a stable 60FPS each frame needs to happen in 16.667 milliseconds.[/p][p]
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All of the individual assets, animations, and vfx that show up on a player's screen have a millisecond (or microsecond) cost that impacts the time it takes for your computer to process a frame, and leads to the number of frames that you see in one second.[/p][p][/p][p]Strong game performance is a difficult goal to achieve when you’re a smaller studio with big aspirations. Our artists and designers work much closer to the game build, and generally priorities a high quality threshold over game performance.[/p][p]Our performance specialist programmers have been using new tools, ingenuity, and the growing strength of Unreal Engine 5 to further optimize performance while mitigating the sacrifice of quality.[/p][p]Game performance becomes exponentially more difficult with each different each different computer's hardware combination, and almost every computer is a little different. We run our performance tests on multiple rigs representing minimum specs, recommended specs, and a high powered unit, but that still leaves a lot of room for players' unique computers to impact their individual performance.[/p][p][/p][p]Performance problems can sometimes be obvious, but sometimes they're not as obvious as well. Things that may seem fine in a vacuum can be problematic at scale; when many characters are active, performance issues can compound - even microseconds can matter! Some of the optimization work we've done recently may seem fairly minor, but when applied to many characters at once can actually lead to significant savings. We have to be careful though when making certain changes as there's a delicate balance between performance and visual quality. It's easy to say "just do things less often", but that's not always the answer if it causes unwanted behavior or choppy animation & movement. Sometimes we have to get a bit creative, which means it may take longer than expected to fix problems.[/p][p]Our next update contains optimizations in many different areas for both CPU & GPU that should lead to noticeable framerate improvements for most players: character animation, shadowing, asset rendering, and more. Optimization continues to be a focus for us, so look out for even more in future updates![/p][p]– essbuh - Tech Lead[/p][p][/p][h3]Optimizing the Experience:[/h3][p]Optimization has been happening behind the scenes update after update since the launch of early access, but improvements might have gone under the radar, as they’ve come slowly. Over the next 3 months we have a few tricks left up our sleeves to optimize players' experience.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
[/p][p]The current in-game building (left) has 250+ individual meshes. Through the use of our automated process we’re able to compress the same building (right) to just over 53 meshes, an 81% reduction![/p][p][/p][p]Our team has been running a new automated optimization tool that looks at unique environmental assets and compresses as many meshes together as possible. The quality of the assets shouldn’t go down, but your computer will have less meshes to render, giving a big boost to performance. We’ve finished our pass on Lewiston and Broadway, and players will be able to experience the changes with our upcoming September update. We’re currently working on bringing the same updates to Powerplant and Pottsville in the near future.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
Another example of our automated process at work, the building above went from 301 meshes to 24, for a 92% reduction.[/p][p][/p][p]Unreal Engine 5 is an extremely powerful engine that’s still relatively young, making each UE5 update a potential powerful tool for game optimization. Unreal released its latest update in June with 5.6, and we’re almost ready to make the leap. While it may take multiple updates for us to fully take advantage of the new optimization opportunities, the update should further optimize players' experience.[/p][p][/p][h3]Tips and Tricks:[/h3][p]![]()
[/p][p]If you find yourself experiencing giant FPS drops during intense moments of the game there are some quick win setting adjustments that you can make:[/p]
- [p]Shadows [/p]
- [p]Motion Blur[/p]
- [p]Bloom[/p]
- [p]Lens Flare[/p]
- [p]Depth of Field[/p]
- [p]As much context as possible[/p]
- [p]What happened?[/p]
- [p]With who?[/p]
- [p]What map?[/p]
- [p]What location of the map?[/p]
- [p]Any other pieces of information that help further flesh out the situation you found yourself in[/p]
- [p]A description of your rig and technical situation[/p]
- [p]GPU and CPU[/p]
- [p]Ping and the region you’re playing in[/p]
- [p]~FPS[/p]
- [p]Video or photo (if possible, they help a lot!)[/p]