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Quiet as a Stone

Throw Rocks Plant Trees. Ambient slow game for casual creators. Countryside exploration and creation. · By Distant Lantern, Richard Whitelock

Gorgeous visuals & fantastic concept, but...

A topic by Ryan Miller created Jan 28, 2018 Views: 1,226 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 4
(1 edit) (+1)

Like the title says, it's gorgeous. I love the idea. I want to hang out in this world and click stuff and play around all day long. However - this takes some serious GPU power to play. It supports Mac, which I appreciate, but it's slow on the top-end 2017 MacBook Pro 15" (w/ 4gb Radeon Pro 560) which is sorta silly. 

Get this for your gaming rig, but don't get it for your Mac unless you've got a iMac Pro or something. This person is serious about the GeForce 970 gpu requirement!

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Hi Ryan. Many thanks for the feedback. It's appreciated. I spend a lot of development time working on a 2013 rMBP.  I can get it up to 40-60fps. But that is running on low quality, or in a window. I'm certainly surprised a 2017 MBP is struggling! Lets see what we can do to improve things. I have some questions if you have the time to try some stuff out?

- Is it struggling on both high and low quality settings?  ( 'h' and 'l' are shortcut keys to switch between them in-game)

- Do lower resolutions significantly improve things? Similarly how does it run in a window? Or with the portrait mode enabled (in settings). I think alt-enter or opt-enter will swtich between windowed and fullscreen mode when in-game.

QaaS is still in development - optimising and adding more settings for performance is on my list so hopefully as many people as possible who are into the concept can enjoy it!  

I'm running Standard quality at 1080p - running a little better today than yesterday for whatever reason (maybe since it's a different/randomized environment every time I start it up). The input seems delayed, but I'd guess the frame rate at 15-20ish now. Windowed 640x480 is much better. Thanks for the tip! I can definitely play it like this.

(+1)

Is QaaS using Metal on macOS? I've found that for whatever reason OpenGL 3 seems to give better performance more consistently for whatever reason.

Developer(+1)

I think it is using OpenGL.  I recall I tried Metal and it seemed to  break some shaders.

It has occured to me that the 'standard' setting on the opening resolution dialog thing might not actually do anything! :o Ideally I will aim to get rid of this dialog and have resolution switching in-game too.
The quality settings are actually handled in game. I would be interesed to know if the settings on the in-game menu change the performance when switching between high and low? (the menu is the top right button).

Wow seems amazing. 

Stunning visuals! Seems like a promising dive.