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An Ergastulum is a building used to hold in chains dangerous slaves, or to punish other slaves. The Ergastulum is subsurface and large enough to allow the slaves to work within it and containing narrow spaces in which they sleep.

Post feature Report RSS Porting to Xbox One and the Things I learned

Since the beginning of March I have been porting the beta to Xbox One and learned many things on the way

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The First Week

14 03 2018 09 57 44

I recently started to port my game to Xbox One and was shocked to see the performance at the beginning. This was partly due to me not doing things well and brute forcing lots of things on the PC. Is it Unity related too? who knows but I am not a great programmer and like to hack things together :)

Before I briefly talk about it, here it is running WITHOUT any optimisation for Xbox One.

Streamable.com

As you can see, the framerate was appalling and something that you cannot see here are the broken levels (procedural generation issues).

I had to take a step back and profile the game like mad and ended up with the following fixes that worked for my game.

  • Image Effects
    • Ambient Occlusion was quite a killer so I dropped quality although you cannot notice it
    • Motion Blur sample dropped to its lowest
  • Removed all unnecessary scripts related to image effects
  • Removed all unnecessary audio from environmental objects (torch fires for example) - I will revisit this down the line
  • Removed all animator components that I left in there from importing objects
  • Implemented layerCullDistances instead of just using the far clip plane for everything
    • Particles and detail objects on a different layer etc...
  • Turned off Motion Vectors on objects that were unecessary
  • Redo my procgen dungeon code to stop levels breaking (not performance related but still needed fixing)

Theres probably a fair amount i'm missing here but you get the general idea. Anyway, after all of the above plus more the game was finally running at a stable framerate that I was happy with. This can also run at 4k on the Xbox One X. It was also interesting to find out that I was able to make it playable on my primary dev computer (Macbook Air 2012) and boosted performance by at least 110%-130%. I can even turn on real time shadows on my macbook when developing! its pretty awesome :)

Heres the progress on March 10th with much better performance.

The Second Week

21 03 2018 07 57 49

Last week, I started to get more bandwidth to improve the game dramatically. This included even better particles for certain enemies which also ran great on the Xbox One.

This was the first test to improve the particle systems but at the same time making sure it ran ok on the Xbox One. When I was happy with the frame rate and performance, I then added a few more different attacks to spice up the gameplay.

Today

27 03 2018 09 14 44

Now this brings me to today. For the last week or so I have been heavily updating the existing House HUB scene. This included batching objects properly, reducing 36 reflection probes down to just 2 and also removing all backfaces where possible. This was the last main chunk of work in optimising the existing scenes and you can see the great results here.

With all this work now completed, it should be easier with the new knowledge at hand.

Post comment Comments
Urik_Valkyer
Urik_Valkyer

yo dude so, how does one partake in your beta on Xbox one?

edit: I own Xbox One, Xbox One X, and play Xbox games via win10

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KMonkeyBlog Author
KMonkeyBlog

Beta is currently private for PC/Mac only at the moment. Xbox One beta tbc :)

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bee-aware
bee-aware

Looks cool (and creepy)! Also looks like a lot of work... are you a solo dev?

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KMonkeyBlog Author
KMonkeyBlog

Hey thanks for checking it out.

Yea a solo dev here. Been working on this project for about 1.5 years at the moment but hopefully will release this year if all goes well!

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bee-aware
bee-aware

I'm impressed...but, is this only for vr? edit: Just read the comments in the summary section, just an option :) my bad. Anyway, I look forward to see your game on the xbox one. Good luck with developing!

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KMonkeyBlog Author
KMonkeyBlog

Yeah I will say VR is becoming less and less important the further I get but we'll see what the need is like when I'm there... it shouldnt take too long to enable it since it was built with it in mind

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