Project Valhalla

u/Dream of Omnimaga March 08, 2016, 09:53:41 PM

It really depends of the game. Free games made by the Internet community rather than companies are usually much more demanding in terms of video card requirements, because they tend to be made by hardcore gamers and programmers who only own high-end PCs, while companies will focus on making sure that their games run on as many platforms as possible. Also, it depends of the game genre. RPGs tend to be less graphical-intensive, but there can be many 3D objects on the screen at once that can cause lag, and there are other game genres like sports games where the in-game map is very small.

u/ben_g March 08, 2016, 10:34:29 PM

Well, this game is based on Unreal Engine, which is a common engine in AAA-games and thus very powerfull. Since I've already disabled multiple features and use materials and shaders that aren't even close to being as advanced as the example materials, my game is still quite a bit more lightweight than the latest AAA games (especially considering the demo runs at nearly maximal settings).

There is still a lot of room for optimizations though. Most of them are small (replacing the realistically rendered sky with a simple gradient would for example improve performance by probably about 2%), but I think I could gain a lot of extra performance by getting rid of UE's physically-based lighting. The lighting looks awesome on realistic scenes, but since I simplify it during post-processing anyway, a much simpler and much more lightweight calculation should do the trick, and doing the lighting in the actual lighting part instead of extracting and reapplying a simplified form of it should also get rid of those weird patterns that sometimes appear at the edges of shadows, since they are caused by inaccuracies during the extracting pass.
The huge downside of this is that it requires modifying the engine, since the lighting calculations aren't opened to the user.

I've looked into making a demo with lower settings, but I couldn't find any documentation on how to do that, so I guess I'd have to create some kind of settings menu to get it to work, or maybe I'll try a script that measures the framerate during the intro/main menu and gradually lowers the settings if it doesn't meet a certain framerate.

My PC and laptop both are only mid-range though, so don't worry, you won't need 4 GTX Titan's in SLI to be able to run the final version

u/Dudeman313 March 09, 2016, 01:22:38 AM

I'm happy to hear that.

u/Dream of Omnimaga March 17, 2016, 08:19:11 AM

I'm glad to hear. Also I saw the Youtube video showcasing the title + intro and I liked how it zoomed on the world from the sea.

u/Dudeman313 April 02, 2016, 09:03:44 PM

So, what are you working on now, locations and puzzles, or enemies and graphics?

u/ben_g September 03, 2016, 11:18:30 PM

Quote from: Dudeman313 on April 02, 2016, 09:03:44 PM
So, what are you working on now, locations and puzzles, or enemies and graphics?

I apparently didn't see this post. I've been mainly working on graphics lately, and I'm planning to start working on locations soon, along with the puzzles that will be put in them.

Thanks to the new Unreal Engine update that released a few days ago, I've also finally gotten shadows to work. This means that feature-wise, my altered lighting system has finally been completed, and I'm quite happy with how it looks now.

I've also replicated the scene in an older version, so you can see the difference:

This old version still had shadows, but for some reason they are almost invisible here. The old version also had a blue lamp in the same position as the new version, but this is almost invisible too.
The wall material has not been updated, the difference in appearance is purely caused by the new lighting.

Now let's hope that I can also improve the gameplay that much

u/Dream of Omnimaga September 04, 2016, 02:12:23 PM

Hm I like that lightning effect on the wall behind those guys.

u/Dudeman313 October 11, 2016, 10:04:28 PM

Very nice!

u/p2 October 14, 2016, 05:15:23 PM

I'm curious have you already mach progress on the fighting engine?

u/ben_g October 15, 2016, 05:49:39 PM

I already redid respawning:

Apart from that, I've been adding additional internal functionality to the player class to make it ready for the new combat system, but it's not at all functional yet. Big parts of the old code can be reused though, so it shouldn't take that long to have a working version.

u/p2 October 17, 2016, 08:57:48 AM

You seem to be pretty bad at this game

are the trees solid or can you pass through them? The forest seems to be pretty hard to cross otherwise ^^

u/Jokeriske November 18, 2016, 02:15:22 PM

Quote from: p2 on October 17, 2016, 08:57:48 AM
You seem to be pretty bad at this game

are the trees solid or can you pass through them? The forest seems to be pretty hard to cross otherwise ^^

The trees are solid. But it is possible to pass through the woods on parts where you need to. Otherwise it will be a barrier.

u/Dream of Omnimaga November 18, 2016, 05:34:17 PM

I will check the video at home tonight

. I am curious about the changes.

u/p4nix November 18, 2016, 05:36:42 PM

I really like the progress and effort you put into this.
Just a question: are the trees supposed to stay at that size? To be honest, they look a bit small to me...

u/p2 November 18, 2016, 09:51:00 PM

now that you mention it, they indeed look a little bit small ^^
but somehow the smaller trees fit in the image I think, it still looks really nice this way ^^