Posted May 01, 2018 by Threshold Seven
After the first couple weeks of open alpha testing it has become apparent that Windstone is very resource intensive and needs to be optimized greatly. Windstone loads fast and runs great on most high end PCs but some testers must lower their settings drastically or can't even load the game. This is mostly due to the world of Windstone being enormous and completely seamless.
In an effort to drastically reduce the minimum requirements of Windstone many assets and the landscape are going through a complete overhaul. The overall poly count is being reduced by many hundreds of millions and the landscape itself is going to be slightly decreased in size. This is almost complete and the update should be live for testing in a few days.
These optimizations have been done in a way that is almost entirely visually unnoticeable. Much care has been taken to reduce the poly count of assets without changing their appearance. If all goes well, Windstone should appear almost exactly the same visually but load faster and run at a higher frame rate.
After the next update goes live, subsequent testing will determine whether development can continue as planned or require even more drastic optimizations. The development vision for Windstone is to keep the world as large as possible and seamless which pushes the limits of the UE4 engine in many ways.