Gijs-Jan

Thank you for the detailed write up, I managed to perfectly replicate it and find the issue. It should get in in the next patch.

Yeah, he's away on a short holiday (he needs one!). I've added it to the morning review on Monday so it won't get forgotten.

Thanks for trying out the build on Linux! I suspect issues, if any, are mostly in Ground Combat with regards to shaders. Feel free to report any issues in either this thread, so we can collate them, or through the F12 bug report but make sure to mention you run on Linux for custom bug reports. Having said that officially we won't support a Linux build at this moment. Unofficially I'll keep an eye on this thread and those reports.

Got it in the issue tracker as well, looks to be a bug in the auto-dropping of items to the floor.

Aw man, I already lost so much sleep the past few weeks :'-( Kidding, we're glued to the issue tracker at the moment and patching what we can!

Out of curiosity, how does it slow things down?

There are a lot of different things contributing to this issue, and it also depends on what type of rendering setup you are using (forward/deferred, lightmapped / realtime etc). One of the big underlying causes is that Unity doesn't really deal well with dynamic environments where there are a lot of non-static GO's. This in particular starts to break down when certain rendering paths don't properly support batching. The end result is that the CPU spends a lot of time creating dynamic batches that are straight up ignored and cause individual render calls in parts of the render pipeline (stalling the GPU). The solution we've tried inhouse is to manually combine meshes and objects for those parts of the level that are indestructible after the scene loads, which already gives a mighty speed boost and solves both above issues. The other issue is that Unity simply doesn't like runtime combining of scenes with lightmaps, which is making completely randomized maps quite a pain to implement. I want to assure everyone that we know the issue, and we've been testing solutions to this throughout development and I'm confident that we can get orders of magnitudes of improvement in FPS. We simply haven't implemented those solutions as they would slow down the work being done on nailing down the level design workflow.

Lot of assumptions there! Adding in multi-tile pathfinding will definitely require a bit of extra code. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it'll definitely require some work. This is mostly because Chris wants to avoid the various issues that multi-tile units introduce.

@Skitso To be honest, I'd refrain from blaming anything on your end before I really start on the optimizations! And when I do and you still have issue, and you have the time, we can probably take a look at what specifically it is on your machine that might be bottlenecking it. :-)

It's definitely planned. Hmm, interesting. I wouldn't expect such a hard drop-off, especially with your hardware (I've got a 1070 here as well). And you're right in that the Simple to Fast is the point where all dynamic lights get shut off. Suspect it's the shadow handling then, which is also tied to the lightmaps. Earlier you mentioned that there wasn't any AA btw; the whole reason we're still using forward rendering at the moment is for AA, and it should be enabled upper tiers.

Yeah, this is definitely due to the lighting setup in that case (per pixel lights is too high on the Fantastic setting). It won't be an issue in the main game. It should be fixed once we sort out the lightmap issues, or alternatively something more drastic to fix it. (There are issues with the lightmapping in the rendering path we're using in Unity, which was used because it supports hardware AA) The transparancy effect is a side effect of how Unity deals with it, and we'll probably need to write a different shader for it.

The FPS drops I've not seen on similar hardware. Have you been able to tie it to specific cases? (Units walking, or shooting destructible terrain, etc) As for the performance: There are a tonne of optimizations we've simply disabled because they just consume development time while things are up in the air. There are "minor" ones such as logging and debug code that cause most of the "stutter" currently in game. There are "major" ones such as mesh merging, lightmapping (for those knowledgeable, a bit more problematic in our setup) and optimizations on the materials, or even rewriting shaders such that they're not just plug-and-play shaders. The mesh merging alone, although mostly benefiting lower-end hardware, bumped FPS about 3x-5x (from 60ish to 300ish). And then there are the cases where some code is still doing way more than it should be doing, because we're experimenting with certain mechanics. You can expect a lot of improvement in speed as we continue development the coming few months because a lot we haven't been able to do as we were still changing, well, almost everything. I'll bring up performance in the morning meeting tomorrow and see if we might be able to put out a comparison build now that the pressure of the Kickstarter is partially behind us.

What can I say; it's the Ayy Lmao bit that sealed it for me. If I ever get the time, I'll try to update this thread :-)

I think I properly understood it then; and it's still a bit of the same issue. Design-wise one of the things we're considering is putting an emphasize on the strength of individual aliens. That would mean we'd have only a couple of aliens on the battlescape, the opposite from having dozens of aliens on the battlescape. Having said all of that, I've still noted it down. Maybe an idea would be to have the Androns fill this role in a terminator-esque horror-scenario. The planned swarm-based alien could exist in support roles to the larger individual (normal strength) Andron units.

Yeah, I like the sound of that. After the release pressure on the Kickstarter and the closed Beta I might look into this in my spare time. I do think it'll be generally straight forward to mod into the game if we don't include it ourselves. I would imagine that balancing it in terms of how the aliens would feel could be an issue. As in, I don't think that most aliens work well for large-scale battles. The idea being that aliens are rather exclusive / in the background. Fighting a host of mind-controlled soldiers backed up by an alien might not be interesting enough.