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This petition is signed by increasing the number of
Franzo's ( Open Source Gaming ) followers on Mastodon
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Optimization
Since
the infamous livestream of the game by
Open Source Gaming, the development was forced to look at optimization.
( Example of the game giving only 6 FPS while there is barely anything in the frame. Provided by Franzo)
With
UPBGE being the game engine of choice there are certain
difficulties when it comes to taming the engine to give acceptable performance. Therefor the not so fast ( by 2025 standards ) system of Franzo couldn't keep up with the game on the stream. Making the experience fun only to those watching it.
One of the most important steps at making the game work faster, was to
reduce geometry. In
Version 2024-09-25 cars were each made out of hundreds of thousands of triangles.
Original Neonspeedster from
Moria's Race who's model was used for the same car in the game, had 221,504 triangles. And it's just for a single car.
In this version the car was brought down to 16,332 triangles, which also includes it's broken version too. Similar reduction in geometry was done to all cars. Improving the performance significantly.
Similarly to the cars, a lot of work has been put into optimizing the town itself.
A complete re-topology of the town's surface was done on all parts that are not roads or houses. Which reduced a lot of unnecessary geometry from the game. The roads were optimized in a different way, as to preserve their shape as much as possible.
A lot of optimization went into materials as well, since their complexity was causing issues too. The screenshot with the 6 FPS at the top of this chapter showcases a big patch of dirt, which used an unbelievably complex material ( borrower from the movie sources ) which didn't even look that nice. Looking away from that patch of dirt suddenly increased the FPS to playable. So apparently the problem was in the material.
The material was separated into 3 distinct materials, one for the dirt, one for the cliff-sides and one for the sand. All of which were in that one complex material before hand. This separation simplified each of them greatly, also allowing them to look nicer in the frame, as well as being more optimized.
Also a lot of duplicate materials were reduced, to instead use the same materials, like Glass, multiple Metal materials, and stuff like Rubber and Plastic, used throughout the game. This made so the renderer uses less VRAM making the game run faster.
The
Opt.GoodFPS function was re-written to take full advantage of the UPBGE profiler, instead of relying on a vague FPS value. This made it more reliable at stopping huge spikes in load on the system. Making the game run a lot smoother and faster.
Night lights
In this version night scenes finally look more or less like night scenes. They are not dark, like they used to be in the previous versions, but rather the streets are illuminated by street lamps, which was
not a trivial thing to achieve without a large performance penalty.
Police Station
A new location, Police Station, was added to the game. Where you can see a large waiting room, multiple offices of various investigators and even a full prison maze. The intention for this location is to eventually be a working Police Station, where the character is taken into when being caught by the in-game police.
Underground
This version has a new car, Underground, which is driven by Michael Hay in Moria's Race. This is a race car, so you could take it to various in game racing events.
Unlike other cars in the game, this car actually has a door for each of the sits. Which makes it very satisfying to break.
Why Franzo?
You are maybe asking yourself why this petition is asking you to follow Franzo and not myself. Well I kind of owe him this version, since most of the changes ( that is with optimization ) happened because of him and his infamous stream of the game. Since then Franzo played a version not too far from the one this petition is about and it seems like I managed to make the game play very decently on his computer. Which maybe will prompt him to play it one more time.
Happy Hacking!!!