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Focaccai14 days ago

Awesome game, very ambitions! It's almost like GTA for aliens. The UI and menu system work great, good font choice! The music is good, I like how it auto pauses when focus is lost. 

All the work you put into building the world feels great. Theres a ton of detail here like the town area is incredible. The light and shadows hooked up to the ufo looks great. Id like more indication of where to go, maybe some kind of radar. Most of the time it runs pretty well but sometimes it has some very severe framerate issues like pausing for up to a second. I think you should focus on investigating the performance issues before you add more stuff, but theres a ton of potential here to build out the game, great work!

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Lurking Horrors13 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for playing and for the great feedback.

I think the frame rate issues are mostly due to chunk loading of the infinite world and I agree definitely needs to be resolved.  Even playing on a high-end dev machine I notice a little frame stuttering.  Claude and I did spend a while making fps improvements, but the chunk loading still causes frequent pauses.  I'll definitely be looking into smoothing that out!

I agree, the gameplay feels unfinished.  I have a post-jam roadmap put together for it which includes mothership communications to create objectives for the UFO, which would give radar-like nav waypoints.  When the player hits tier 4 the idea is to do a raid on an army base (which already appear in the game if you can find them, just not much going on there yet).  Maybe I can borrow you for a second play test eventually :)

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Focaccai13 days ago(+1)

You could try just getting rid of the chunk loading and having everything loaded at once. Then just control what gets rendered and updated. Instead of infinite it could just be a large world and if optimized properly it should not need to be steamed in. You can still use the chunk system to prevent rendering far away chunks.

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Lurking Horrors13 days ago (1 edit)

Yeah, that makes sense.  I got the agent working on something along those lines this morning... I'll post back if it succeeds.

The main reason I have it doing an "infinite world" is just that I am not an artist so wanted pure procgen producing the game world.  But I should be able to use that to pre-bake a sizable hunk of the world, I would hope, and do less on-the-fly generation at runtime.  Then, as you say, fall back to JIT loading if the player exceeds the large pre-baked initial area.

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Lurking Horrors9 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Uploaded a new version with several big perf gains.  Interestingly, my theory about chunk loading being a bottleneck was largely refuted in the end (at least running on my dev machine -- some improvements were made there but the lion's share of improvements were found elsewhere).

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Focaccai9 days ago

It is still feeling pretty choppy here. I know a good frame rate is possible because at times it runs at perfect 60fps. Then it hits a big spike where it freezes for about a second.

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Lurking Horrors9 days ago

thanks for retesting, I’ll keep digging then :). Maybe I can find a different machine to test on.

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