Posted May 05, 2022 by Artificials
Certain people complained about low fps, like below 40, which makes the game unplayable. I tested on my weakest and oldest Laptop to have a reference. Measured my systems to get to the expensive ones.
The following bug fixes are not yet uploaded as I need to test them first throughout. I promise to upload a newer demo version soon. Be warned I removed the underground levels and replaced the first one of them with the machines in it. Still, there are machines but different and more soldiers and not yet the undeath army.
I had too many small vertexes which I had to send over to the graphic card every time, so I had to batch do tiles in one node and transfer it in one go, which improved the throughput quite a bit. This was actually a very simple and quick one.
It turned out that the physic system did send too many updates for certain physics blocks which didn't move at all so I filtered them out. So no if physical elements don't move they don't send position and rotation updates to the graphic system anymore. This did a great deal of performance boost. But still...
The AI is very expensive too if I have 50+ soldiers in one level plus the falling blocks which have AI behavior too. The AI part was much more tricky to improve. I ended up only running AI which is in a certain radius around my player, which is totally fine. As well as remove the behavior of falling blocks that stay in the game which as well cost performance.
Furthermore, I run the NPCs in parallel by dividing them among a certain amount of threads.
Not sure if this is already the end of performance tuning as my old Laptop has still some trouble with certain heavily loaded levels. But the performance is now much better. I didn't yet upload a new version as I want to test more and see if I can squeeze out even more performance. Would be handy if it runs smoothly on my laptop, so I can provide more hardware at the next game show.