itch.io

I'm sorry but the demo download button is missing for some reason.

Next time be so kind to upload the game to gofile or mediafire. It took me two days to download the archive properly as it kept dropping the download too many times.

Thank you for listening, I'm sure that will make your future games much better. Looking forward to your next projects.

Hi, Lemioutgames.
I assumed you understood what to do based on our previous discussion but it seems I need to clarify that once again. 

You did a great job compressing the textures and resources, but your main task should be cutting the single map of a game into smaller levels that would fit into 2-3 GB of VRAM each. You're literally ignoring the biggest flaw of Gameguru Max. No offence but even 13.6 GB  is way too much to load all at once (which is evident from the initial loading time of 16 minutes. No game should take that long to load). Nobody in the whole gamedev community does that.
In order to fix the issue:

- Cut the game into multiple levels, minding the VRAM usage of each level as everything loads at the same time. This engine is unable to stream data in and out so each level has to be well-balanced in order to be playable.

- Gameguru Max default terrain is notorious for drawing too much resources. I noticed that the forest section gives me 3-5 fps until I go into the city, where I get 15-20 fps max, which leads me to conclusion that your terrain might need replacing or at least retopology. I don't know the exact method you used for planting trees but looks like they are not batched (might be wrong about that)

- Group and attach together identical meshes to reduce the number of drawcalls. 
Don't get me wrong, I'm really trying to help you out. In my opinion, it's a bad move to go Todd Howard on your fans and assume that everyone must have 3060 or 4090 these days in order to play the game they bought. 
If you have any questions, feel free to message me anytime.    

I'm still hoping to see an optimized version of Chapter 1 and 2 someday.

It seems the same steps are valid for Max version as well. Someone even used 1050 for a benchmark here https://thegamecreators.com/post/gameguru-max-performance-improvements

After some thinking, the single level approach is definitely the culprit. This is probably the first time I've seen someone do this as every other game was split into progressive story levels. 

I also tried lowering shader settings as follows:

visuals.shaderlevels.terrain=2

visuals.shaderlevels.entities=2

visuals.shaderlevels.vegetation=2

visuals.VegQuantity=60

visuals.VegWidth=35

visuals.VegHeight=35

visuals.CameraFAR=200000

visuals.TerrainLOD1#=3000

visuals.TerrainLOD2#=4000

visuals.TerrainLOD3#=5000

visuals.DistanceTransitionStart#=2500

visuals.DistanceTransitionRange#=300

visuals.BloomEnabled=0

visuals.DepthOfFieldIntensity#=0

visuals.MotionIntensity#=0.3

visuals.FXAAEnabled=1

visuals.WaterWaveIntensity=80

visuals.WaterReflection=0.2

visuals.WaterSparkleCol=1.0

visuals.SkyCloudScale=40000

visuals.SkyCloudThickness=50000

visuals.SkyCloudCoverage=0.9

visuals.ShadowSpotCascadeResolution=256

visuals.SAOIntensity=0.3

No result whatsoever, which means the single level is so huge it doesn't fit into 4GB of video memory. 3060 has 12 GB of VRAM which allows it digest less optimized games better. 

I'm just saying, I was able to run games like Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, RDR2 and so on. Those were able to run because modern engines use streaming assets plus splitting into levels to make the maps fit into that 2-4GB VRAM bill. As Game Guru MAX can't do that, your biggest task would be to split everything into levels.

You can join in Blender or attach in 3DS max the cars that use the same material and texture together, the same goes for decorative elements, walls, windows, doors if they are separate to create chunks of similar meshes that will be loading and unloading by distance. In other words, each level should contain only meshes that are used by it. It will reduce your drawcall count as each separate piece of mesh takes another drawcall to be rendered. 

Optimizing your projects will save you tons of issues and attract wider audience as not everybody can afford better PC these days. That also will improve your skills as a game developer. Thanks for listening, I appreciate you taking time to fix everyting.  

My specs are: 

 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz   3.40 GHz

RAM 16.0 GB

GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (4 GB)

I tried lowering texture resolution by using dividetexturesize=2 command. Also added the systemmemorycapoff=1  command to avoid potential crashing on load. The game mode is on, the drivers are up to date. I play at 1080 resolution.  The game runs off SSD.

I've taken a look at some textures, they seem fine in terms of size, so the issue might be in game meshes, complex shaders or the number of materials  used in the scene. I'm no Game Guru expert but it's usually optimized by occlusion culling, shadow culling, terrain chunk culling, object distance culling, delayed shadow rendering, disabling unused objects collision, compressing textures (yours are okay I think), using less complex shaders, etc.. I heard this engine loads the whole game at once without streaming assets which severely affects performance, especially if you have the same model copied over and over throughout the level (the cars, wall modules for example).  The less is loaded at once, the better performance, so one of the ways out would be splitting the game into more lightweight levels and merging repeating objects into one mesh or a number of groups which could be culled by distance. The spawns seem to load on trigger only which is good (the number of enemies is quite heavy though, the football team of monsters spawning all at once on each pickup makes everyting lag (I also avoid some monsters to save my ammo, which increases the number of them chasing me around the streets), also breaks the immersion). 

All in all, I think you could use profiler like Optick to see what's going on with the game. I've also found this optimization tutorial, might come in handy. I know it's a lot of work for you being an active developer, optimization is crucial, otherwise every project will have someone like me complaining.

Thanks man, I really appreciate you responding to the feedback. Sorry for being rude, I got frustrated when I realized I paid for the games that woudn't work properly. I'll make sure to stream the latest version and promote the game in case it works better.  

UPD: Tried the game, still barely playable at the lowest settings. The initial woods are 5-10 fps max and it gets slightly better (around 20 FPS) when walking around the streets. I was hoping to do a full walkthrough but with recording on it's gonna be a slideshow for sure. The first level loads for around six minutes, not sure about the rest of the game.

The game is laggy as hell, it can't be played normally even with memory cap disabled. I don't know what you did there but my PC handles way more demanding games with no issues. 

Also what's the deal with the screaming monsters? Someone just blew the mic out screeching on top of their lungs and thought it would be scary. I'm gonna have to mute those or replace the sounds with something else because those are really annoying. Still have to force myself through the first levels but I hope you'll improve optimization eventually.