Week 26: Easter Holidays - FPS Optimization?

A level full of lag.

Another week has passed and we find ourselves within the ongoing Easter holidays. This will be a rather short post, since not much has happened this week! While it is a bit of time for me to rest, it is also the time where I finally get to implement most of the gameplay into our Alice In Wonderland level though, so I will try and get more done during the next week.

The problem we are having at the moment is with FPS and optimization. We started off the week by implementing the much needed LODs into our level and after all the work of implementing them had been done, we noticed only a very slight increase in FPS, which is not what we had hoped for! The level still runs with an average of 15-25 FPS and that's simply not good enough, especially considering that we are using high end PCs and we simply can not expect the judges to have a similar machine to run the level on. So I took another look into it and got in contact with some communities online to figure out what exactly was causing the FPS lag. After quite a bit of digging I discovered a tool that would help me debug the frame rate and with that I could easily see that one major issue was lighting.

My first step was disabling all the dynamic lighting on the foliage, since (thinking about it now) having thousands of meshes cast a shadow, which changes every single frame would obviously be quite heavy on performance. This however meant that we would loose all the shadows in the level, which made it look a lot worse, so I decided to try using static lighting instead. Unfortunately I did run out of time in the end and wasn't able to build the lighting yet to see what the level would look like with static shadows, so I will have to try this out as soon as possible.

There was another element that was causing a lot of FPS lag (approximately the same amount as the dynamic lighting), however I have to further investigate into that as well. Hopefully by the end of all this I can get the level to run at 30FPS+ and then focus on getting the gameplay elements implemented.

Until then, stay tuned~