Shooting Gallery & Performance Boosts [Test Branch] (Update #405)

🤔How to Access Test Branch:

How to opt into the free test branch to test new features early:

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/276C-85A0-C531-AFA3

🧍🏼‍♂️🧍🏼‍♀️Player🧍🏼‍♂️🧍🏼‍♀️:

• Adjusted damping math to provide better camera smoothing

• Player's impact sound with ball has been fixed.

  That satisfying 'thud' sound you hear when hitting a ball is back, and won't get cut off from playing anymore.

🌍All Levels🌍:

• Significant performance increases across entire game

  Taking use of GPU Instancing, static batching, shared materials, mesh optimization, LOD's, and more.

• Optimized all kinds of objects to use less memory, resources, and draw calls while still giving same result

• Removed some legacy meshes and streamlined Arena for all maps

• Combined meshes in cases where there was no need for them to be seperate

🌍Free Roam🌍:

• Proper Occlusion Culling in place to significantly boost performance

• Proper lightmap bake in place to boost performance

• The Grid shader (which 90% of the scene uses) has been optimized to be even lighter on performance

• Reduced triangle count on multiple heavy objects, freeing up performance

• Arena sound distance reigned in (won't hear it from as far a distance)

• Removed shadows in areas where they weren't being seen anyway

• Reduced scene density in dense areas by ~1million triangles while keeping the same appearance

  New Mini-games

• Free Roam has a mini shooting range, with a mini game where you shoot the ball into triggers to unlock a star.

  Also includes a switch which can automatically reset your balls for you.

  Misc.

• Stars have a sound you can hear from a certain distance to help find them easier

• Added an area with water (no unique interactions yet)

• On top of the normal sound fans make, they now also make a specific sound when you are inside a fan, which stops when you exit one.

• Coin has more pickup range and a better sound effect.

• Rocks in scene now have correct collision effects.

• Fan was rebuilt to be more modular, use less resources, so we can include more of them in the scene

• Terrains have more grass patches to them

• Some trees are now climbable and have stars at the top of them to collect

• Optimized portal object

• More performance improvements

• Added LOD's to several objects to free up performance.

• And more!

A lot of this week was needed performance improvements.

Without the headroom, we couldn't keep building the game, or we'd have to split the game into smaller chunks (less fun).

But we really want to play with large, sandbox-style play areas where you can run around and collect items and use your movement in new ways.

The improvements also make the entire game run better, which gives us room to add even more things to the game!

• Player's bottom UI circle projects onto player meshes and clubs when it shouldn't

• Low FPS in Free Roam when looking in certain directions

• 3rd Person Camera can occasionally get twitchy

🧪Single Player Adventure Levels🧪:

• It's a fun mashup of platformer and sports game we've been wanting to try for ages

• Make your way through platforming challenges

• Find the ball in the level

• Bring it to the blue goal on the other side

• Beat the team defending it to destroy their base, opening up access to the next level.

• Score on the net to destroy the base and move on!

☁️Cloud Saves☁️:

• We've pushed code in recent builds that should handle Steam Cloud saves for everyone, we just want to give it a little more testing and confirm