IBT Survival Island Game - Progress Report Twenty Six
Welcome to this weeks update on IBT Survival Island.
Work continues and the bug list grows, but we continue to make progress.
We have been working on destructible items. For example, a tree is chopped down or knocked over it falls down. A pile of rocks is disassembled so they crumble away etc. Sadly, all this takes hours of time to do and learn. Hopefully, not too far in the future we can release a decent working playable demo that gives a taste of what's to come. The gif provided shows where we are at so far. Character approaches tree, presses a certain key, the tree falls, resources are given after tree falls.
Lately, the Frames Per Second (FPS) and performance have been dropping really badly as the map has more and more content added to it.
IBT Survival Island uses a lot of interactive items that need to be picked up, moved etc. This week has been all about how to improve this. After a lot of painful research we found the answer. There are way too many "live" actors (Actors are interactive trees, grasses, rocks etc), on the map waiting to be activated. Because they are waiting, or as we say in nerd land "ticking" they are not dormant and use up a lot resources. The great news is we have worked out how to fix this! The actors are now dormant, plain, no thrill static meshes. They literally do nothing but just look good. Though, once a key is pressed and you are within the required distance to harvest or collect an item you are after, the Static Meshes are converted to actors. So far, so good.
Well that's it for this weeks update, thanks for following along and I hope you have a great week - Steemon!
That'll make a home base difficult won't it? If it's based on distance and players keep all of their actors in one place that'll slow things down as the player progresses.
From what we can see most of the game designers (open world games using engines like UE4) leave everything on as Actors. We can see this when playing the games, it lags and there are delays when you go to interact. This comes from a point of view that the players should have gaming rigs - so who cares If the game forces you to upgrade your computer to play.
I come from a poor background, I built my first computer out of office parts dumped an XT; so I know not everyone can afford expensive gaming rigs, and like Steem I like to build things everyone can play. So if you can use Steemit, you should be able to play in at least a low res mode. This is also why we are trying to build the base game for free to play..and for those who really enjoy and have the means have a few DLC (but this isn't a pay to win DLC...it's more of a extra missions or extra bonus's just for Steemians, linking with prizes etc potentially).
...Trying to understand your question fully, but yes while you are near the home base (camp site) it is likely to have more activity around it and thus potentially more actors slowing things down; it's the combination of two things that change the object from a 'pretty object'(static mesh) to an 'interactive object' (a actor). One is the distance, get so close, but this alone is not enough, the other is the act of pressing a key to interact and then convert it into an actor for the interaction. It's not as simple as this for all objects, but probably this is the easiest way to explain to less techo people - But yeah essentially you are correct there is a greater likeliness that multiple actors will be in play around the base, because of the complexity of the character and game etc; still, it's no where near as bad with this 'fix' created.
It's a bit difficult to explain as I didn't fix this one, but the trick is to destroy the 'pretty object', replace it instantaneously so the player doesn't see it with an 'interactive object' when the two requirements are met. Once the interaction is complete return the object back to it's previous 'pretty object' state. It's a rather elegant solution for a problem that I can see most game creators face.
From my perspective the game must run on a avg persons laptop these days, we want people who use social media like Steem to enjoy the game - especially more when we integrate with the blockchain. At the same stage the UE4 engine can really crank the graphics, so we want those who have the powerful PC's to benefit as well. In the end we will create a reasonable compromise...hopefully :)