How We're Improving Performance

Rulers of the night!

As we continue our work on performance optimisation, we wanted to share a bit of our progress with you. It gets a little technical, but we hope it gives you a glimpse of what's going on behind the scenes right now.

We can't wait to get back to creating new content, but this groundwork has to come first, so everything we add later stands on solid ground.

In the meantime, we hope you're enjoying the August events!

The Shadow Problem

With the biggest CPU problems behind us, we turned our attention straight to the GPU. Our game was consuming a lot of memory, far more than it should for what’s actually on screen.

One of the culprits turned out to be shadows: how many objects cast them, and how many of those shadows were being refreshed every single frame by shaders. That quickly became our primary concern.

Our fix had 2 steps.

First, we disabled shadows on smaller models, where the visual payoff simply wasn’t worth the cost.

Second, we changed how some shadows are generated. Instead of using the actual, detailed models, we now generate them from custom collisions.

Together, these changes have already dramatically lowered the resource demand of shadows. It’s still a work in progress, but the gains so far are significant!

Custom Collisions

A collision is the invisible shape the game uses to work out where a solid object actually is: what can be walked through, around, or bumped into. A custom collision swaps it from a full, detailed shape to a simpler, purpose-built outline.

Steam post image Before and after: Custom collision visualisation of a path in the starting area.

In this case, our NPCs planned their route by reading the environment’s collisions. Handing them a stripped-down version of the map means there’s far less for them to calculate, which lightens the CPU's load. It's easier to move on them for players too, so it helps with any navigation issues.

And, this one is for you console players: simplified collisions are lighter on RAM, which will matter enormously once we move the game to consoles, where memory is tight.

Trimming Heavy Assets

While chasing memory, we also found several assets whose high mesh density was eating into our memory reserves. While it wasn't a full-blown teeth-rendering crisis from Cities: Skyline ll, this needed attention too, so a large number of assets have now been optimized and improved on that front.

Steam post image In-game assets visualisation before and after optimization.

Smoke, Fire and Sparks

There’s still more to optimize - we've found out that the game was still calculating lots of particle effects even when they were off-screen and no one could see them. Our focus has been to disable them when they're not needed.

In practice, this means going through all the levels and placing the particles under a specifically designed manager that decides when each effect actually needs to run.

As you can imagine, this helps a lot, especially in places like Hells Chasm.

Your Help Matters

Every log and bug report you send is gold to us: they point us straight to where we should be looking next.

So please, keep them coming: through the Steam discussions, our Discord, or the help desk.

You can expect this big optimisation performance patch to roll out around the beginning of September.

See you in Sangavia!

Vampires Bloodlord Rising