Sneak Peek #5

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hi there, fellow ylanders!

Although we keep adding new cool items and features all the time, (and have no intention of stopping anytime soon ;)) the game development, especially when it comes to Early Access version, isn't only about the new stuff, but also about making sure the existing things work, and that they work well enough. We've already mentioned that we keep looking at features that have been already implemented so that we can improve them, or - if they don't work as intended - rework them altogether. There is, however, also one other topic that needs to be addressed - game performance. While the game is well playable on average gaming PCs we know that there's actually a long way to go even in this area.

Simply put - we want the game to run way faster than it does now. We want it to run well enough even on rather slow computers with integrated graphic cards. And we are well on our way there. Since the release of the game we've optimized it a lot already - some scenarios that used to run below 20 fps even on powerful PCs can now be played at nice 50+ fps. But to be honest we do see a lot of situations where Ylands should still perform a lot better.

 

You should know that we are gradually improving the performance - sometimes the improvements are smaller or can be experienced only under specific situations, other times they are general and easy to spot. From now on we will tell you about all of those.

So what's been happening in our offices lately that could help the game run more smoothly?

Petr, our programming wizard who is (along with another skillful guy, Filip) responsible for numerous optimizations has struck again. This time you can expect around 40% faster generation of terrain, which will result in traveling over the yland a smoother experience and make terraforming less performance-intensive (which will eventually, because of this, also look smoother). Also, if you've been experimenting with water and think that now it acts more like a slowly spreading pudding than a wild nature element, then we share the same opinion, and you can once again sleep peacefully knowing that somewhere out there, in the deep silent night, Petr is having some serious talk with our game engine about this topic.

 

And that's it for this week - looking forward to seeing you the next one and in the meantime, you stay classy, ylanders!