Alterworld progress

[north sorrel]

Welcome to the discussion of Alterworld, a looter-shooter with random generated levels and items.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBJVYCnX54I

[weak juniper]

Cool Project, i like the RPG with Shooter and Loot Idea. Magic is not mine, but this is preference. Do you Work alone on this ?

[north sorrel]

Yes i do

It's heavily inspired by Hellgate: London, the levels are randomly generated, so it's quite hard to optimize, but runs around 60fps on a Vega7 now. I do have issues with shader compile tho, but i'll try to iron that out eventually.

You can go on full weapon spec if you like or full caster mode, or even hybrid, there are no medieval stuff like staves or such tho, but the guns feel pretty balanced atm

[north sorrel]

Alterworld progress

i'm working on a new explosion effect atm

[north sorrel]

This is what it looks like in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=my9OX8_AIn4

[north sorrel]

Long time no progress update, i'm currently working on displaying custom weapon models for various guns.

[visual marlin]

Honestly i completely missed that this one is available on Itch, gotta try it out!

[visual marlin]

It's gonna be fun i can tell

I love the music

[visual marlin]

Man, i remember modelling that fuse box for gm_toxicsector, it was fun time, i've not expected to go down the nostalgic trip

I kinda like this game and i don't really understand why doesn't it have more attention

Like seriously it's a whole game with levels, enemies, weapons, magic, skills, loot, neat japanese ads...

Idk i can't do much for it except randomly posting screenshots of me playing the game

I probably understand that you dropped the thread support because nobody kinda joins it for some reason

Honestly i wonder how much time does it take for you to export this game

Like 1.25 GB holy shit that's a huge one

[visual marlin]

Hey, i'm not sure about others, but this "session" thing sounds kinda misleading. I've been playing this game for about 3 hours

[north sorrel]

Hahaha yeah, i'm glad you are enjoying it, that session thing was estimated by the fact that you don't really have to put so much time into the game to enjoy it, even if you only have like 15 mins of free time, you'll have a similar experience, but i get that it can drag you in, especially as you make progress with your gear/skills.

Also wanna say thanks for the feedback, i really appreciate it, honestly i was starting to think there is some breaking issue with the game as you've also noticed it didn't got much attention so far.

To answer your question an export takes around 2-3 minutes for me, so it's not really much.

[north sorrel]

I'll definitely include your name whenever i have a credits menu, man i really like this fuse box, it's so nice, thank you!

i'll eventually upload a new build with various improvements and a new minion skill, but i still missing their visuals. Otherwise they seems to work pretty well.

[north sorrel]

it will also include this new feature, after you kill 66% of the mobs in any level you can use this guide to the exit

[visual marlin]

that session thing was estimated by the fact that you don't really have to put so much time into the game to enjoy it
Ah! Alright, gotcha, i played today for 30 mins maybe and yeah it was fun and helped me to wake up at morning

thanks for the feedback
;)

To answer your question an export takes around 2-3 minutes for me, so it's not really much.
Damn, back in time, Index: Purger's "Build 4" took like 15 minutes each time for me (1.0 GB), as result i had to write a custom exporting system. I'm happy that i did that because now i can export 6 GB game in 3 minutes. Maybe if i could get better PC... Anyway!

[visual marlin]

Damn, that would be a game changer for me. I had an issue with completing the depot level, that would help A LOT!

[north sorrel]

In the other hand, developing on an older PC will make you aware of optimization issues.

[north sorrel]

i could upload a non-official build if you are interested which includes all this, i just don't want to upload it to itch until the Mechafang visuals are done 😛

[visual marlin]

Maybe! Mainly i had to accept the fact that... Sometimes, i cannot implement all the ideas i want to due reasons of performance. On other hand, i still find ways to optimize stuff! Yeah if you'd have seen the settings menu, it even has a non-functional dropmenu that would allow to "disable the game" as a joke

[visual marlin]

That'd be fun! And if anything, i'll have to report it, right? I kinda love to playtest the games

[north sorrel]

Yeah i had a hard time optimizing this stuff, especially as it still runs on Godot 3.5

[visual marlin]

My game too! Godot 4 is maybe superior when it comes to graphics, but i heard people complaining about physics and some other things. Maybe it's not that bad that we both stuck

[north sorrel]

I would appreciate if you report, it's not a requirement but definitely helps me making the game better over time

I'm waiting for 3.6 atm, merging some static meshes will be a huge improvement

[visual marlin]

Sure thing then

[north sorrel]

I'll prepare a build for you then, and thanks 🙂

[visual marlin]

I find it funny that i managed to write my own mesh combiner 2 months ago and then i've seen introduction of Lawnjelly's mesh combiner in 3.6...

[north sorrel]

Yeah i was sure there's gonna be an official implementation so i didn't bother to do it myself, i think i've read something about this a year ago, or so.

At least my fps seemed quite stable when nothing extraordinary happens, and i hope batching will improve this to the level when it remains stable even if you have a lots of effects on your screen, but we'll see.

[visual marlin]

MeshInstance does have a method to merge mesh instances, but it wasn't working for me (i have to combine props with many different materials) so i was forced to write one, and i'm kinda happy i did because that helped to lower GPU usage while keeping much higher level of detail. But i have to admit that it broke a lot when i first developed it and it is still imperfect, but still better than MeshInstance's merge

Idk maybe you'll find that method in MeshInstance useful for yourself, it might be faster than GDScript shenanigans too

Got to go

[north sorrel]

Never really tried that but if it can at least merge meshes with the same material just fine it could be fine. For example some of the decorations like the pallet piles and matresses are non combined, they only have 1 collision but the meshes are separate still, which means a lot of extra draw calls i could spare

[visual marlin]

If you want, i can rewrite my own mesh combiner and provide for you as a singular script that could be used either from code or from editor itself, i'd be happy to share it with you

[visual marlin]

From what i've seen in 3.6 post, it looks kinda similar and it may be used on any kind of hierarchy aka it is merging all children MeshInstance

Here i am again!

Probably i have a weird skillset

Committing a massacre is always fun

[visual marlin]

Man @north sorrel thank you so much for that, it'll make my future experience better, it was fun to use the minimap but this is gonna make it AMAZING

[visual marlin]

Lovely friends

[north sorrel]

I'm really glad you're enjoying it so much, i'll try to deal with the issue you've been reported, seems like it's related to your screen resolution

[north sorrel]

Now the game also has an Index: Purger ad, thanks for the creative 🙂

[visual marlin]

Same for Index: Purger!

[visual marlin]

Duuuude

It was fun playing on that level

It'll be fun to find another one

[north sorrel]

So you've found it, great! 😄

[north sorrel]

How do you like the minions so far, are they doing their job well?

[visual marlin]

THEY ARE AMAZING

I'm always spawning them

Btw i tried playing on maximum difficulty and... Basically i have 2 suggestions for this game

• In windowed mode, you can actually make the game use a window, idk, on Windows for me it is broken for some reason
• On higher difficulty, the enemies become much harder to deal with, but i've not noticed any reward for that. I'm not sure if you've configured it, but it would be great to have more dropped loot (or higher quality of it?) from enemies if you play on higher difficulty

And also i'm still very impressed this is your first game, given all the tricks with shaders you did. Damn, i even opened the .PCK file using VPKEdit to explore it lol

I love how the minions have a circle UI elements on them, damn, i'm not even sure how to make one on my own lol

And that trick you did with skybox is astonishing too

[north sorrel]

Windowed mode is kind of broken atm, i'll deal with it eventually, but it's a know issue, thanks for the report anyway!

On the difficulties, well i get that usually games do that what you said, but at the same time those things usually make the game easier, like you can acquire higher quality loot and just deal with the increased difficulty rather soon, same with the xp bonus. So i've came up with this current system where enemies are much tougher with each difficulty and the xp bonus (you actually get 25% per difficulty) is less that the HP bonus the mobs get, to ensure it's not really worth it just for the bonus unless you can kill them almost as fast as you do in the previous difficulty.

The item quality doesn't increase either, but the spawn rate of champion mobs do, and since every champion grants you at least 1 item drop, you can think of it as a slight increase of drop rate.

The circular menu is just an alpha texture used with a TextureProgress node

i'm using the same texture for "under" texture just with slightly darker tone

And i'm using an animation player for color changes and such

The skybox is a rather complex (and quite expensive) shader, i had to make it a bit more simple compared to the original one as it was killing fps on older GPU-s

Btw you can try to go for luck stat on some gear, they do have an impact even if you won't immediately notice, but the overall quality of loot will increase

All it does is reducing the chance for white item rolls, so you'll get higher tiers eventually

[visual marlin]

Glad to know about the windowed mode and totally understand the decision on difficulty balancing

[visual marlin]

Damn i wonder what kind of experience you had before you started making this game, all the stuff you do is just wild. If you had seen the team that forced me to use Godot... they are just a bunch of damn weaklings with overexaggerated expectations in comparison to you

[visual marlin]

Alrighty! I have one item for luck but gotta try getting more

[north sorrel]

Well i already known the basics of programming, i've made very simplistic games like text based rpg-s tried stuff like RPG maker, but making my own engine always felt like an unnecessarily huge task for one man, not to mention the tools it require to create something like this, so i never really got into it until Godot. Unreal and Unity always felt too robust to me, thats because i've started with Godot, and looking back it seems like the best decision i could've make, as Godot doesn't have so many solutions out of the box, you have to make just enough things for yourself to learn how do they work, which helps you become a better developer in the long run.

Aside of that i'm an avid gamer, god knows how many hours i've put into these kind of games so i have a vision on how they can be improved, what are they always missing and what features could work if you combine them.

Since i'm a solo dev i had to make some decision to make thing more simplistic, for example why i don't have an NPC, or why i chosen not to have a separate entity for currency, it just makes things complicated. You don't have to sell things to get money in this game, you just break down stuff and use the scraps as a currency to upgrade your existing ones.

The price tags on the upgrades were also decided on the estimated pace you could get an item of that quality by drop

But dropped items still have a benefit tho, it wasn't really intended but turned out pretty well (it's not a bug it's a feature moment)
Some affixes cannot spawn on low quality items only on rare+ so you'll never get damage augment on your items on your first upgrade for example, which means if you upgrade an item to legendary the best case you'll only get 2 damage rolls. But if you get a legendary by drop it can have 3 damage rolls.

As i said this is a bug but a welcomed one as it ensures it's always worth looking on items you find instead of just trying to roll a perfect one.

[visual marlin]

You've got a great background in my opinion. The guys i had to work with were dreaming about how to become a millionaires lol. Their background is making a Garry's Mod server, apparently they didn't do as much programming as i thought they did

[visual marlin]

Damn dude i'm impressed that you perfectly understand your capabilities at start and made balanced game design, that would be amazing to see what is going to be the next project

[visual marlin]

I kinda started to realize that the game itself is more balanced towards the dropped items, which is kinda fun

[north sorrel]

Yeah i never really chased money, i would rather make a good game which "sells itself" rather than make an asset flip in hope of a lot of more income than refund 😛
And by making a good game you may earn the trust of the ppl playing it, which means they'll probably buy your next one too.

[visual marlin]

It's kinda sad that you may not be able to put Alterworld on Steam, because used assets may not allow it due to license... or am i wrong?

[north sorrel]

Yeah but i wasn't planning to do that anyway, it will remain as an itch game 🙂

[north sorrel]

for example a unique plasma pistol in the game

[north sorrel]

On my way to lvl30

[visual marlin]

Damn, you kill them fast, i still have to upgrade to that point!

Also you just reminded me of thing that i forgot to report. I don't know why, but performance of the game drops heavily when i start playing in the sewers level. Only this one seem to have this issue in my case. Mainly i think the reason of performance drop is more active usage of CPU, but i cannot be sure because i've not tested it with use of debug tools

[north sorrel]

Might have to reduce the number of barrels there to save some on draw calls. 🤔

[north sorrel]

How much draw calls do you have on that level on average? You can check it by pressing F1

[foggy edge]

If you make the barrels, I think its called multimesh or something like that, it should all be one drawcall if I remember correctly

[north sorrel]

yes but that doesn't allow you to destroy them one by one

i made some changes already, reduced the number of barrels, added some new templates with less draw calls and changed the decoration weight in favor of those which have less draw calls

i'm expecting an overall draw call reduction on average from this, it will be even better in 3.6 when i merge some static meshes

[visual marlin]

It says 89 drawn objects, which is a small amount if you ask me

"In-and-out, 20 minutes adventure"

I almost killed this boss

As you understand i've been severely screwed up

[north sorrel]

nice, then you've found the other bonus level too 🙂

[north sorrel]

Dash seemed to be a 1 point wonder everyone is using and felt superior to the original sprint mechanic, which i was quite unhappy with, so i've added a new functionality to sprint, now it can damage objects along your path and also knocks back non-boss enemies.

The base damage can be improved by spending points on Strength, which is now also improves stamina regeneration along with it's original stamina drain reduction.
This change also makes the Swiftness passive viable, as it reduces the stamina regen delay after a charge, and you can also get huge benefits by using Toughness passive (improves armor) with a build which heavily relies on the charge mechanic.

On top of everything the damage dealt by charging into enemies can be augmented by your gear, enabling various builds (damage augments, applying secondary effects or triggering novas for example)

[visual marlin]

Man, that's exactly what i was missing

These barrels were so annoying because not all of my weapons have that much ammo, but now all barrels will get screwed

[north sorrel]

Yeah and it seems to open up for a very different playstyle and possibility for new builds again, i'm experiment with it already 😛

[north sorrel]

It's really satisfying when you hit your enemy just right, and it knocks them back until they die

[north sorrel]

I'll probably upload a build soon without the minions, because so many other things got implemented recently 🤔
Technically minions work too but i don't wanna release them without the visuals

[north sorrel]

uploaded a new build, which doesn't have the minions but plenty of other stuff
https://alternalo.itch.io/alterworld/devlog/745076/new-build-and-plenty-of-new-features

if you are specifically interested on minions just ask me and i can send you a custom build, they seem to be fully functional just doesn't have visuals.

[visual marlin]

Damn i love them a lot dude, i can't wait to see them with visuals!

[north sorrel]

At least you can still use them in this new build with your char i just temporarily disabled the ability to learn the skill 😛

[north sorrel]

Yeah almost forgot to mention this new release also includes the ad of your game 😛

[visual marlin]

GAME TARGET #4

Currently downloading the build, damn, my internet sucks lol

Gonna try it out later, i'm glad to know that i can use the skill!

[visual marlin]

@north sorrel i understand if that is not an actual game level, but it looks fancy and it would be amazing to see it

I love how PPSH gun is called Tompson here!

I've found my favorite weapon of all times for now

I don't really understand what's the deal with this "skills" thingy on an item

Also i understand we may have drastically different views on that opinion, but i think prices of enchantments should be lowered. It is not that easy to get screws in general

Found the ad

Found it twice!

I love what you did with sprinting in this game, that is a genius game design solution i've seen yet

[north sorrel]

you can actually find this template in the city level sometimes, it's quite outdated and buggy, expect a performance drop whenever you find it, but it's there. I'll eventually rework this area to be more optimized.

[north sorrel]

Skills are active skills you are using like the fireball or even sprint. Resource are refering to both mana and stamina costs.

[north sorrel]

You cannot upgrade unique items, or items past legendary quality, the price tag there is just a visual glitch, as you can see you have 0 upgrades left (i may turn that text to red when it hits 0 tho)

I wonder if you have any improvement in performance in sewers now, as i made some optimizations on that level type based on your feedback.

[visual marlin]

Thanks for clarification!

[visual marlin]

I'll check it now

[visual marlin]

So, yeah, i think there is certain improvement in this level, but at the same time, it still lags. Before you think about drawcalls - i had several levels in my own game where they had that kind of amount of draw calls and i had 80 fps on them without gameplay logic, my GT1030 does the job just fine in this case. What's so different in this level? Collisions? I feel like it would use concave ones for example. Node count? Also...

[visual marlin]

I would try finding this area, but what makes it laggy too? Maybe it can be related to sewers?

[north sorrel]

might be the ambient audio then, i've noticed the audioserver sometimes seems to struggle, but i'm not sure why is that

[visual marlin]

Oh, i can send you a script to analyze that thing, i had similar problem in m_day1_1 quite a time ago

[north sorrel]

that would be nice, thank you. I just don't understand that using 3D audio nodes could be that demanding?

[visual marlin]

If you make hundreds of sounds, instancing them and etc - that can be costy

But if it is just a couple of looped ones - that shouldn't be that bad

Also remember that audio server can be reported as "costy" one by profiler when it is not even related to issue

Let me find you a link in my "blog"

#1240057765678813245 message

This and 3-4 next messages are related to optimization of m_day2_poor_zone, in which i had 2 fps

Issue was related to a hundred of invisible ragdolls colliding with each other

Profiler reported it as a problem of audio server that took 100 ms on processing, but in reality it was a problem with physics

[north sorrel]

But i don't even have ragdolls 😛
Unless i forgot to set the correct flags for a static object collision, so time to look up a few assets then

In the very early stages of development i had an issue with collisions where 2 static objects presenting in the same layer as their masks were killing fps and the solution was to make sure they are in a different layer than which they are searcing for collision. I think godot4 solved this problem already but it's there in godot3

[visual marlin]

What the fuck .-.

[north sorrel]

sec i'll try to demonstrate this

[visual marlin]

2 StaticBody collide with each other? Shit

I think that may be the reason of many lags in my case

I may need to try experimenting with that

[north sorrel]

So in this case the solution is to set the 2 static bodies to collision layer 1 with a collision mask of 0

this also means that you have to make sure any kind of entity you want to collide with walls must have a mask of layer 1 too

[visual marlin]

I bet a lot of that shit happens in my case

I have a whole LocationPhysics class that initializes physics in run-time, that takes some time, but i think it's good because i can get more control over it

I'll try preserve ~8 layers and just switch layers by using some global counter or something like that

If that'll improve performance of my game, damn, you will be my personal hero

[north sorrel]

I'm happy if i can help you in any way, it's quite strange this wasn't a huge issue for you as i've experienced heavy performance drops in my game quite early in development

[visual marlin]

I bet that may ruin performance in m_day1_1 because it has quite decently complex geometry (i mean brutalist mall all that stuff)

The more i think about it - i'm now surprised too

[north sorrel]

btw my personal favorite is this

[visual marlin]

Lol it seems to be very powerful especially with consecutive attacks

[north sorrel]

yeah i usually pair it with an M61, it has a mag size of 250

[visual marlin]

I shouldn't have scrapped this one

[north sorrel]

Can be a beast with some damage augments

[visual marlin]

Holy shit you play this game like a cheater lmfao

I wanna get to that level once

[north sorrel]

I'm sure you'll get there, there are plenty of powerful combos

[north sorrel]

some of the assets like that cage which is visible on picture 3 and 4 is using a trimesh, i'm not sure if that causes that much trouble on it's own. I've exlored my other assets too if any have the mentioned issue with collision layers but didn't found any. Is that drop of fps is consistent when it happens or it's only happening for a few secs and it goes back to normal? Because if the latter then it might be just a shader compile happening

[visual marlin]

Yeah usually i ensure to have it all compiled before reporting, i think i compiled everything. I think it starts lagging more when everyone start blasting/attacking me. There are silent moments when i quit the spawn and these are usually not as laggy, however, my audio does some weird noise like CPU is struggling to process the sound (like in case of shader compilation, but i can assure you no compilation happened in that moment)

[north sorrel]

Yeah that sounds like we are back to the possibility of an audio related issue 🤔

[north sorrel]

One thing you can still try is disabling ambient sounds in the settings menu, if that helps then it's clearly something with the audio

[visual marlin]

I'll try it out when i'll get back to the game!

[visual marlin]

Duuuude it runs so much faster .-.

What kind of ambient sounds you have?

I love that structure lol

Damn i could've missed a neat level just because of sounds, glad to see you've added that option

Also, just asking, are you using "Rooms and Portals" thingy? I couldn't get it working at all and i've limited myself to "Occluders" only as result

Woah dude

Oh shit here we go again

THIS GUY GOT WRECKED

I definitely had fun with today playthrough

[north sorrel]

i'm using 3D audioplayers, each of them covering an entire room and those pipes each have one with a smaller radius, i wonder if the audioserver is struggling because of the overlaps.

If so it's kinda similar situation which i had with lights, namely a single omni with a large radius can be more costy than several smaller ones, but at this point it's just a theory

but i'm really happy that we are getting closer to a solution

[visual marlin]

Oh, interesting. I don't really know what's the design of your system for (i assume) soundscapes, but sounds interesting

[north sorrel]

i don't use portals but distance based visibility checks and occluders on some cases

occluder polys are useless tho, don't use them

the best you can do is removing nodes from the tree which cannot be seen

[visual marlin]

I would not agree, they helped me to get better GPU performance at m_day1_3_post0, but i would agree they aren't suitable for all cases and usually require the level itself be made for them in first place (the case of m_day1_3_post0). Man if you had seen what the hell i did with them to make them work properly lmao

[visual marlin]

I love that method too! LocationChunk for the win, especially at m_day2_poor_zone

[north sorrel]

based on my testings occluder spheres are much more efficient than polys, most of the cases i didn't gained as much performance by using them than they cost to check the objects behind

[north sorrel]

i'm doing this with everything not just static geometry but with the mobs too

[visual marlin]

I've not used spheres yet but that sounds interesting! Glad to know you've used these

[visual marlin]

It's a fancy one really, i think i use it on lots of various things, like ragdolls (yeah added this one nearly ago as you understand)

[north sorrel]

well yeah, performance is very fragile in godot 3 and you need plenty of tricks to make it work

[visual marlin]

I know 400 relatively honest ways to shoot my own legs

[north sorrel]

but i'm still happy i've started off with godot 3, as i've learned a lot of things about optimization and how things work, which can be used in future projects even if you are using godot 4 or other game engine

[visual marlin]

I agree, Godot (especially 3) doesn't try to cover your ass as much and usually provides a lot of stuff related to computer graphics as it is (or in form that is universal for modern day engines). Knowing how much you managed to handle (and god you did a lot), you will make even more great stuff in future in whichever engine you pick next

[north sorrel]

pretty sure i wanna stay with godot as long as i can, but will switch to 4 for anything new

[visual marlin]

I would like to know your opinion on 4 (you surely will switch faster than me lol), i heard certain complaints to physics in general, but everyone love rendering part...

... especially because of new occlusion culling that would've been very handy for your game now

[north sorrel]

don't have a large enough project in 4 to have an opinion on the physics but the performance is unbelievable compared to 3, it's so much easier to optimize your scenes

[visual marlin]

You'd be helpful to guy that was working on #1151311410882686996, i hope he returns to it one day

Ah yeah almost forgot to bump his thread

[north sorrel]

Yeah i've seen him struggling for a while, i see some potential issues on his approach 🤔
For example i think it would be better to turn the background buildings into a single texture by making a 360 render of them and apply it on a cylinder with front culling.
He should also check the static body collisions but as i see in his screenshots of his profiler it isn't the physics process what takes up the frame time.
I think he should turn off post processing, and only use albedo texture, especially on things you can't get close to, there is no need for normal maps in that case. If he's using triplanar texture: don't 😄
He could turn off shadow casting on smaller geometry which doesn't impact the visuals greatly but it will do for the performance.
He should carefully check if he's using transparency on anything which doesn't really need it to prevent overdraw issues.

Just from the top of my head, not sure how much of this stands for his project, but generally he should try turning things off until he see what is causing the issue.

[north sorrel]

So i'm experimenting with audio now, and increased the latency from 15ms to 50
11ms process time on average when it's turned on this is still quite a huge difference but as much as i understand how latency works it should be easier on your CPU with 50ms latency, which is great as the CPU is mostly occupied by giving out so many draw calls to the GPU so you cannot really afford to have your CPU struggling with something else.

Since a lot of 3D audios are playing at once on that level the CPU is working on mixing the samples which i assume takes quite long

[visual marlin]

Have you tried doing these distance checks like on NPCs, but on 3D audio nodes?

I assume that each section of level has plenty of them

[north sorrel]

they should be removed with the entire room as they are the part of the scene which is getting removed by distance

[visual marlin]

Oh alright that seems to be tricky already

Hmm i'm not sure if you noticed that in build 4, but there is a soundscape system like in Source games

I have a node that checks distance to camera and if camera is in radius of this node, it'll activate a "soundscape"

Soundscape is actually just a little bunch of looped sounds and, if set, a bunch of random sounds that play...

Damn now i wanna start up a Godot to show it to you, it takes a while for me

Basically what it does is just basic arrangement of sounds with little randomization to diverse it

Actually now that i say it, i don't think you'll need that system, but just saying it could be done in this way (maybe you'll need it in future)

[visual marlin]

Gotta try to turn that mess i wrote into something more informative lol

• "Soundscape" node checks distance to camera and activates an assigned soundscape to it by calling a "soundscape player"
• Soundscapes in my game are just a bunch of looped or random sounds
• When you enter a soundscape, looped sounds blend from previous ones to current ones smoothly
• Random sounds randomly play whenever timer is timing out, after each time, a random delay is set for that timer based of a config
• Each "soundscape" creates a bunch of sounds that it needs, however, that doesn't mean that each "soundscape node" does it, it is only making it initialize once to blend to it when you enter a soundscape

[north sorrel]

so basically instead of using actual 3D audio nodes you have this bunch of normal audio players and you switch them on and off based on distance right?

[visual marlin]

I use 3D audio nodes for cases when i need to make a specific object make sound like a vending machine or radio music, i usually try to be very cautious with these because there are tons of other cases like NPC's firearm shooting or footsteps that can use CPU more heavily. If there are more heavy cases like sound of pipes... I usually prefer to try making these a part of soundscape's looped sound because usually environments like that include pipes around

Kinda like that, basically you are right, i try to use AudioStreamPlayer more often when it comes to environmental soundscapes

Here's a bunch of looped sounds as an example

And a bunch of random ones

[north sorrel]

looking at this atm, sounds like something i should do with my existing 3d audios
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/t3uu1t/performance_of_audio_range_modes_in_class/

this means sometimes when you cannot hear the audio but the scene isn't got removed by distance the CPU is still mixing audio samples, so i'm setting these to pause when out of range, ensuring they doesn't use your CPU when you cannot hear them

[visual marlin]

I'd love to see an impact of it!

[north sorrel]

strange, i see no significant difference between having them at pause or even at lower range, but when i disable them completely it's suddenly much better

8-10ms frame time if they are turned on, no matter the distance or the out_of_range mode

i'll keep them on pause anyway, i guess it won't hurt

[north sorrel]

Managed to fuck up the thumbnail of this thread, nice 😅
I wonder if you've seen this building yet

[visual marlin]

Looks interesting .-.
I have 2 guesses: I may have seen it and missed it... Or i've not found it, i usually pay attention to environment. Sounds like a game target!

[north sorrel]

it's one of the rarest buildings which can appear, so it's possible that you didn't saw it yet 🙂

[north sorrel]

Menu loading times will be lower in the next release, from 20-25sec to 8-9 sec

On my end at least, depends on hw but you can expect less than half of what it used to be

[visual marlin]

Sounds amazing! I wonder what did you do to lower it, but i'm glad to know either way

I honestly hope i would be able to just use PC to develop the game and accomplish my personal game targets in Alterworld

[north sorrel]

i was exporting resources as text (the default setting), now they will be exported as binary which loads much faster

[visual marlin]

Damn i have personal PTSD with these. I used to save locations as .TSCN and it took solid 10 minutes to save it each time. After switching to .SCN it reduced the editor saving times drastically

Glad to know it has a positive effect on everything

[north sorrel]

Very large TSCNs can be caused by embed resources, for example if you are making a resource unique and then saving the file without exporting the resource as a separate file, the TSCN will contain all data in that resource, but if you save them separately the TSCN will only contain a reference

[visual marlin]

In my case i didn't had much of embedded resources, i fixed that problem, it was related to meshes that were stored inside. I started to store them outside in a special "meshes" folder as well as collision data. For some reason, saving of location also caused these to save too. Turning to binary format somehow helped me to improve it, but still may take time in certain cases. Not that i'm too surprised that is happening in >12 GB project lol

[north sorrel]

yeah it's much better generally, 99% of the time you won't need to open a resource or a TSCN in text editor anyway, the only time i did this was when godot4 was in a beta state and it had that bug which messed up TSCN files sometimes, and i had to manually correct it. But not a single time i touched them this way in godot3

[visual marlin]

Text scenes are surely useful for debugging in my case because i can miss certain things. But even in this case i cam resave the file as text one and just look at it. Binary supremacy for the win

[visual marlin]

Good thing i learnt how to make good killstreaks in attempt to find the building

And i was lucky enough to find ads too lol

Even though i've found that park numerous times, damn, no luck in finding the building yet, its truly rare

It was fun killing tons of aliens while listening to "Make it Bun Dem"

[north sorrel]

Nice, you'll find it eventually i'm sure 🙂
I'm glad you're still having fun with the game

[visual marlin]

Managed to get the best killstreak yet

Happy 17 lvl too

And still no building

[north sorrel]

Congrats on leveling 😄
Have you found any interesting items aside of the weapon you are using currently?

[visual marlin]

Yeah i tried a couple of dropped weapons, but they were not nearly as effective as my current build. Still looking for alternative though! I love this build, but a bit of diversity would be great. Maybe i should try out making build that would utilize critical damage

[north sorrel]

Plenty of options for that too, either with a sniper+mastery or my personal favourites are shotgun builds

For example all your spells or even your charge attack will benefit of sniper mastery if you are wielding a sniper or a pistol

[north sorrel]

sometimes lucky

[visual marlin]

I love this build, rocket launcher works amazing, UZI is reloading fast, and lucky shirt too

[north sorrel]

Nice, it becomes even better if you get some source of magic damage to trigger some secondary explosions

[north sorrel]

Haha i'm surprised this level even works, nice hack tho 😉

This was the first iteration of the warehouse level, due to optimization issues it's no longer used

[visual marlin]

Nice level! And i kinda love how you've used JSON files to configure that stuff

[north sorrel]

Yeah it makes it pretty flexible, you can even create your own items without any programming, unless you want a new unique stat

[visual marlin]

Sorry for literally breaking into .pck, but i love going that deep into games i like lol

For example nearly ago i was surprised there is a set of advanced development tool available in Spider-Man 2 The Game, idk why but i liked it lmao

[north sorrel]

I feel kinda honored by that atm, never thought someone will be that much interested in this game 🙂

Also a bit nostalgic to me, as i haven't seen this level for ages by now, i kinda wonder if i could make a similar but more optimized level, as i really liked the tight rooms and all

Wonder what all that improvement to the core gameplay cause on that level now, secondary effects, novas, various spells and weapons, and even minions 😛

[visual marlin]

It was fun sprinting the shit out of mutants

[north sorrel]

Yeah i remember this level wasn't even spawn protected so it's possible that you'll immediately face some tough enemies

[visual marlin]

Which i did lol

It was fun

[north sorrel]

got this template now, it has some navigation issues, if you have active minions you should resummon them as soon as you go downstairs

[visual marlin]

Looks lovely

[north sorrel]

i'll eventually remake it to be more optimized

[north sorrel]

soon

[north sorrel]

but wait, there is more!

[slender epoch]

looks really cool

[north sorrel]

thanks 😄

[north sorrel]

adjusted the placement of the equipment slots a bit, it was bugging me for a while 😅

[north sorrel]

Wanna make a devlog about minion ai soon-ish, and i wonder what kind of info would be interesting/informative for you to worth read it? Does it need pictures or some short of video presentation too or would you prefer a plain text format?

[visual marlin]

Honestly, in your case, it may be nicer to make it the easiest way. But i think you are asking me a question what is potential "maximum" you can do and... Maybe both videos and images that would clearly illustrate its behavior? You know, the ones with debug information and nice editing. It may be overkill to make now, but maybe that would be a great practice for future because i think people love looking into nicely made dev-log videos

[north sorrel]

Thanks, i'll try this eventually. Just got an interesting thread going on where ppl pinpointed most of the issues/shortcomings with the game, and with the site itself, feels like plenty to do already.

It's really the fact that most ppl doesn't find the game interesting to download and try it, you happened to try it by accident and seems like you like it, so the first thing to do is to make the page more appealing i guess

[north sorrel]

search by affix name implemented

explosion effects got a nice visual touch with proximity fade