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AGDG DEMO DAY 51

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A jam submission

Project SoSView game page

Explore a strange and desolate world.
Submitted by storytale — 33 minutes, 59 seconds before the deadline

Play game

Project SoS's itch.io page

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Comments

Qwott1 year ago
  • I see you removed all the books, but my CPU (not GPU) usage is still hovering between 80-90%, and the main menu is still in that range like it was before. Still stuttering. It's definitely not a graphics issue.
  • You should be able to use the D-pad in menus.
  • Get rid of the delay before you can move after going through a door.
  • Those "holes in the wall" behind the pictures look more like scratches.
  • Tomo talks about it rapidly filling up RAM, but for me it went up to 260MB on one try and stayed at 350MB with the occasional spike up to 500MB on another. Still seems high, though.

Still can't play it for more than a few minutes at a time and there's no saving, so I'm not getting much further than that.

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Tomodev1 year ago

I don't know what kind of a Machine I need, but this lags to unplayable Amounts. I'm getting maybe 2-3 FPS.  Have you checked how much Power it uses on your System? Are your Assets optimized or full of unnecessary Geometry? Do you use some form of fully dynamic Lighting everywhere for everything or something? Weird lighting on transparent Surfaces? Constantly running AI Logic, Physics on everything or something?

For Comparison, I'm on a Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5, 16GB DDR4, and GTX980. 

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storytaleDeveloper1 year ago

I'm not very good with profiling. I ran into no framerate issues but I have a stronger rig. I did a bit of snooping and i'm pretty sure I know what it is and I uploaded a new build. Uh, let's just say that this library doesn't have a very diverse selection to choose from right now.  The new file is "ProjectSoSEmptyLibrary"

I'm usually not as callous with my level design but this time I was kind of panicking from not having a lot of time.  I used a simple diffuse specular workflow and in total, there are only 7 realtime lights, 5 of which are hardly ever rendered in the scene. If it's not the stuff I removed then it's something else and i'll just have to kind of let it go this DD.  

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Tomodev1 year ago

Still lags, looking into the Taskmanager, CPU stays stable, but as soon as the Level is loaded you rapidly fill out RAM. Are you repeatedly re-instantiating something, maybe in a loop or in an Animation somewhere? Do you have some Memory Leaks? 

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storytaleDeveloper1 year ago(+1)

So after doing some more profiling I managed to get my main CPU thread response time down from 10ms average to 4ms average. It was most likely a glitch associated with URP and rendertextures not wanting to properly render under certain circumstances. I also did a bit of restructuring so that the inventory is not constantly being rendered and only renders when needed. I am not quite sure if this contributed to it (it probably did a lot lol).

I also added an FPS counter too. It will probably go unresponsive during interactions and stuff but it should work in most of the game. 

And this is like, probably the actual final thing i'm going to do for this demo. I never really meant to have all these silly problems come up. I am due for a massive refactor, but I suppose if I want to move forward with game development I need to be able to recognize and realize optimization issues and rendering glitches that hit performance hard. 

I reuploaded with the new changes if you want to give it one more shot. Thanks Tomo. 

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Tomodev1 year ago

The Lag and the RAM Issues seem to be gone, but my PC is acting up a lot generally this morning, so I'll try and give it more of a play this Evening.

So far, it's incredibly dark and hard to see anything, but that might be due to the current Lighting conditions at my Place aswell.

Your Doors have a very small interaction Box only at their Doorknobs it seems, so you have to stand pretty accurately to move over into the next Room. I also liked/like your Camera a lot more when its in the more traditional RE-Style like in the Foto-Section, or previous DDs. It also works a lot better for your Playermodell, which looks like a nice abstraction then, but more like a very roughly formed blob up close. 

Your Camera Controls in Third Person are really Janky and just feel wrong, and you don't lock the Mouse to the Screen during Movement aswell.

If you're using render Textures for Inventory Items etc., consider rendering them all out only once at level load, or even prerendering them before building your Game and keeping them as static Assets. If they don't rotate, but only scale/move, you can save a lot of performance by not constantly rendering the same Texture again and again.

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Tomodev1 year ago

After playing more, its not so dark, but a nice Darkness when you're playing in porper Lighting Conditions. Your Levels are very vast and empty, very unnatural feeling tho, I'm assuming they're placeholders for testing Purposes. 

The Camera really should just be RE-like, the 3rd Person one for this doesn't work well I think. Your Players Hand-IK for the Baseball-Bat and Head are also too far behind the Playermodel, so it looks like he's bending backwards a bit all the Time.

No Idea if or how I can open my Inventory, didn't really try, it opened for the Flashlight Part by itself anyway. Inventory lagged horribly tho, are you recapturing your Rendertargets every Frame there? 

The Puzzle itself was alright, the Scratches behind the Wall could and should be more detailed I think, currently they could just aswell be only in the Paint, and not through the actual Wall itself. You should also be able to investigate them from the Backside.

I liked that the Riddle wasn't straightforward, but had you go through both Sets of Numbers, and I liked that the Doors that couldn't be opened pretty much all had a unique Message. Would love for it to be shown more visually aswell tho. Generally I think you need a bit more visual clarity, to where the maintenance Room is, that a Door is locked with a Keypad etc. But again, I'm assuming its a rusty generic Door everywhere because your Levels are placeholders for testing anyway, and not final. 

Overall, if you fix the Performance, and revert back to RE-Camera everywhere, it's all about replacing Placeholder UI, Levels, Models, adding more Props and more Detail, then content and missing Systems ofcourse. I didn't really think I encountered anything being buggy. Your Hitboxes for picking up Things, interacting with Doors etc. are really small tho, with the imprecise movement on Keyboard thanks to your pretty bad Camera System, it doesn't make it easy to hit those. (I couldn't try it with Gamepad, because it kept spinning and attacking constantly)

Your Combat is boring. It doesn't need to be super engaging and deep, dodgerolling and Combos or whatever would be way too much for this, but it should pose a Thread instead of just stunlocking your Enemy, so you'd prefer to avoid them I think. Maybe it'd be this Way if you encounter 2 or more at once, but currently its just annoying for them to be there, and nothing else. Another aproach could be to make them scarier, you overall have a lot of Room for Improvement on your Atmosphere. 

And consider adding RE-like Door loading Screens, instead of slowly fading to black, then being stuck behind the Door with inverted Camera for a bit until you're allowed to move.

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storytaleDeveloper1 year ago(+1)

Thanks for putting up with the technical issues. I am glad to at least find the source of the problem. 

I am using a render capture overlay on a separate camera to render the inventory. Only inventory items are rendered on this screen. I probably need to come up with another solution because I didn't think the performance dip would be that bad. The main inventory can be accessible from the pause screen, but it probably would have lagged anyway, and really only serves as flavor text in the demo, and to tell how many health packs you picked up. 

I planned on adding signs for each area but ran out of time. Signs next to the door to show 'maintenance' or 'employees only' or something would have been nice to indicate.  I don't know why your gamepad was attacking constantly, that sounds like a bug, but the camera recentering sounds like a problem with the camera itself. I'm supporting keyboard and gamepad in the next versions I think. It shouldn't be too hard. 

There's caveats to both camera systems I guess. The third person system gives a lot of agency to the player, but detracts from the experience. A fixed camera can make for engaging sequences, but can sometimes be frustrating if the player wants to look at something, or maybe there's an enemy around a corner and they can't see it. 

Overall, I would like to come close to the fidelity of SH3, both camerawork and graphic fidelity. I think designing levels having a lot of fixed camera angles in mind would be a good thing, but for areas with a lot of dimension, I think it would be nice to let the player have some agency. So I guess in the end, it comes down to how I design the levels, ideally with very few areas that have larger dimensions. This build in particular had two larger areas to get a better feel of the camera. 

This feedback helped me think about things a lot. Revisiting my references shows me that i'm a bit far off my mark, and I can use this information in the new refactored version. Thanks again. 

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Qwott1 year ago
  • You need deadzones for the sticks. My camera is constantly spinning around.
  • The game somehow maxes out my CPU and causes constant stuttering once it loads the level, and even on the main menu, the CPU usage is about 4x higher than it has any business being. Its unplayable. I don't remember previous versions being like this.
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storytaleDeveloper1 year ago

I'm not sure about FPS issues on the main menu, but I uploaded a new build which will hopefully fix framerate issues in the actual level. The new file is "ProjectSoSEmptyLibrary". 

I'll revisit the deadzone. In areas where the player is allowed to control the camera,  it should try to naturally align with the player's direction, but it shouldn't be moving at rest. 

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