Hey all, hope everyone is well.
It's been a rough few months, I'm barely making enough money to get by, and well, that's pretty demoralizing. I started playing with other projects and thinking I needed to try and get something new and decent out, and quick, with all the skills I've gained over the past 4-5 years. That's of course kind of silly, and after spending some time working on some different projects I realized more clearly that that's just not who I am nor what I want to do. I may have to take up some supplementary work to keep all of this going, but the third option of just releasing as 1.0 early and seeing how it does would honestly be a disservice to the game and everything I've worked on these past years.
So I'm back, working to polish up and integrate on the road to 1.0. For starters this patch introduces a few small performance improvements, as well as one pretty large one that was running very redundant checks, especially when hungry or thirsty. There's still room for improvement, but this patch is already much better with handling passive stats and quickly repeating buffs.
I've also done a fair amount of what is called profiling, where you put an application under the microscope and really watch each piece to see who's slowing things down. While doing this I have identified shadows, grass, and sky rendering to be the three main culprits damaging performance. With this knowledge via actual hard numbers I've implemented Low, Medium, and High video quality preset buttons to the in-game video settings. Each button has a tooltip as well, but will in short primarily tone down grass, shadows, and cloud rendering in those orders. I don't have a super fast machine (hence the poor frame rate of the trailer =o=) but can range from 45-130 fps depending on the settings. There's still very much a number of things to be done for improving performance, and I consider that entire profession a constant work in progress.
I would like to focus on a few different things these next couple weeks, one of which I brought up in Discord and would appreciate more input on.
[h2]Character customization[/h2]
The current system is "neat" in that it allows you to stretch your arms and tummy and things like that, but mostly just ends up with silly characters rather than being some sort of high level customization engine. In short it's really kind of a gimmick, though I've been proud of it's presence as it is something that's not all that easy to do.
My main question being, how would you feel about a less robust, but more performant, likely prettier, character customization system?This would likely be reduced to things like height, skin color, hair, hair color, some different faces and easily enough things like fangs, horns, etc., though probably nothing fine tune-able like arm size, foot size, etc. Facial features could be a thing without interfering with what would likely be entirely new weapons and armor, but probably not something included in the initial system. I would also likely be able to add a much greater variety of weapons and armor as the current system requires things rigged specifically for it.
[h2]Character controller[/h2]
The current character controller uses a mix on non-root based animations and physics, to the effect of very smooth movement that doesn't necessarily reflect what is actually going on in the animations. I get a lot of reviews that people feel it's "clanky" for example. Personally it's not something that bothers me, but it's clearly something quite a few people notice much more than I do. I am looking into replacing the current controller with a root-based system which means that the animations would actually be driving the movement of the character.
[h2]Standing out[/h2]
A lot of Unity games have kind of a Unity look to them. I've, partially subconsciously, tried to make the game look a bit like reality, likely because that's what I'm used to looking at. I'd like to play around with altering the colors more extremely to create a stronger fantasy feel and to help screenshots stand out further from other games.
So, there's a bit of uncertainty in the near future, with a number of possibilities still up in the air. It's a big project and there's still some things left to do to tie it all together. Hopefully a 1.0 release is received well enough to merit continued work on the game post-1.0. Thank you as always to everyone that has supported the game thus far, and my apologies development has been slowing down as the months add up.
v 0.8.1.0 2022.06.06
- Fixed some performance issues, several primarily related hunger and thirst
- Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
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