Dev Log 9#

Hello everyone! There's been a fair gap between this and the last update, mostly because I was waiting until I got some graphics from our beloved artist but that might be another week away.

1. Performance Updates
2. AI Updates
3. Dynamic Scene Loader-Unloader Updates
4. Composer joined development

1. Performance Updates

While being curious and generally playing around with the game and profiler, but mostly trying to fix an AI; I achieved some massive performance boosts.

I benchmarked the game and found that at around 14 Runaks on-screen, the frame-rate dips to around 6FPS in the Unity editor even when not detecting the player. After some tinkering with everything and changing a bunch of stuff, I got the frame-rate stable and holding at around 50FPS in the Unity Editor even with 41 Runaks on-screen with most of them detecting the player (detecting the player costs some performance, but not that much with the changes now).

This is great news for those people who might play the game on netbooks or extremely low-end computers because the power required is drastically lowered. That's not to say the game was a resource-hog before though. Prior to the test, the game was running fine on my Acer Aspire E3-111 which has an Intel Celeron N2930 CPU and runs Windows 8.1 Pro, as far as I could tell the game ran without lag at full 60FPS but this of course was a build and not in the Editor. Not that anyone who buys the game would be playing it using the Editor. Point being it ran very well before and now runs even better.

2. AI Updates

I mentioned before that I was tinkering with the AI. Most notably I was playing around with the Runak AI again. Originally it just walked around, jumping at the player when detected. I gave it some more personality but finally using the land animation Frece made with the rest of the sprites, ages ago. Now when the Runak jumps and eventually lands, it will play a short land animation during which it will not move or change direction, giving the player a little time to either escape or get in a few shots to kill it.

Among the AI updates are a few changes to the Base AI scripts and player detection methods. Nothing major, just a few subtle changes to do with setting it up and performance.

3. Dynamic Scene Loader-Unloader Updates

 So I mentioned this before and now I mention it again, even though I'm pretty sure I said somewhere that it's 100% finished (it is). Well anyway, I finished it even more by making it more robust in the sense that it's a lot more forgiving to me accidentally screwing up the set up, along with it clearing scenes in a better way. Along with another script I called the FolderCleaner, there are no accidental duplicate rooms being created at runtime.

I guess this would also result in a performance boost since the engine wouldn't be making duplicates.

4. Composer joined development

 New to the development team of NiTL is an American composer who goes by the name of Bryan Davis, I particularly liked his chiptune music as well as his orchestral pieces so I sent him a message followed by a huge email explaining the project, goals and methods and he joined on to help compose the soundtrack. Feel free to look him up, he works freelance as well as helping to development NiTL.


That's all for now folks, hope you enjoyed the update!