Optimizing my Game so it Runs on a Potato

[@r4ych836]

This is the best kind of devlog, gets you excited about the game and also teaches you something about game dev!

[@Blargis3d]

thank you, glad you enjoyed it!

[@calebgilbertyt]

So true, I think most of the gamedev audience is a little brained out for something "entertaining", and just want something interesting and inspiring, amazing video blargis!

[@cinderblocktreehouse]

@@Blargis3d hey so uh do you know what the price is going to be?

[@tophatplayz1648]

@@Blargis3d For the issue with having to choose 2 systems you could have a settings bar where you can choose what system the player is going to play on. I'm not sure if this would work in practice but if it does work it could fix alot of the issues happening for people with older devices. If that doesn't work you could resort to have 2 version of the game on vulkan and the other one OpenGL

[@TheInfamousLegend27]

@@tophatplayz1648 while it's a nice thought to enable as many people as possible to play, that would also mean double the work for them; two different graphics APIs, reworking would have to be done for all the postprocessing, particles, etc., and even then, it would never be an identical experience due to the difference between the APIs. think of it like a game that has a PS2 and PSP port. that's essentially what you're looking at, and twice the game for one developer ain't that great of an idea ':D

[@Queue3612]

You should absolutely have the loading screens cycle through different titles like "Loading Game" "Compiling Shaders" Just so one of them can say "Beating Level For You" or something in reference to a replay being played in the background to generate the shaders

[@redgeoblaze3752]

I remember Terraria has a ton of quirky loading messages. I'm sure some of which are actually indicative of what's going on at that given moment, but there's also ones like "Mining Bitcoin" thrown in there, so who knows.

[@krux02]

@@redgeoblaze3752 quirky loading messages that don't actually explain anything are actually quit common. As musch as I can remember Word of Good had quite a few funny ones. Age of Wonders 2 had some. And the oldest I remember is "reticulating splines" in Sim City 2000 level generation.

[@FlanFlanScarlet]

@@krux02 Reticulating splines is my favorite nonsense loading message. It just feels so.. crunchy. It's also in sims 1 and 2 I believe.

[@trollsansofficial]

If he does this then there should be a message that says "stealing your blood"

[@adhillA97]

"Tidying the Castle" - and it enables the sound so you can hear all the clattering

[@theridonculesknights]

Shader loading sounds are fucking hilarious

[@UsernameDoesntCare]

game be like "son, our neighbour is coming round to visit" game: "OH SH- FCK FCK CLEAN UP PUT EVERYTHING AWAY, KILL ALL THE DEMONS RQ"

[@theridonculesknights]

@@UsernameDoesntCare just Gmod glitching out sounds as the game scrambles to make itself presentable

[@Czarewich]

I kinda love it and wish it would stay in.

[@FrankHarwald]

seriously, the fact that you neither tell why or when shader compilation triggers now that you can't trigger then explicitly is really ridiculous.

[@AnonNopleb]

He better make a secret setting to enable this

[@Markty07]

12:36 PLEASE MAKE AN EASTER EGG TO ENABLE THE SOUND AGAIN "It sounds like the game is frantically cleaning a room" Is waaay too hilarious

[@Fireway12]

Up, this gives life to the loading screen

[@player92381]

i vote for this

[@foggylight187]

I also found it pleasantly nostalgic, from back in the Roblox days where you would be loading into a game but you could hear all the other players in the background while you did.

[@Markus_included]

It also kinda sounds like the character is fighting it's way into the level or something like

[@trollsansofficial]

Maybe as a code

[@wolfcl0ck]

"Light baking can sometimes take a long time, think on the order of minutes." Literally the best advertisement I've heard for Godot as someone whose main engines up to this point have been Source and Unity.

[@STNGR4Y]

How long does unity take usually for light baking?

[@MarcusBuer]

@@STNGR4Y yes

[@sujimayne]

​@@STNGR4Yyes

[@koekje00005]

@@STNGR4Y for a complex scene? hours. you can still do other things in the meantime, but if you dare hit play on your scene it goes in the trash and you'll have to wait another 4 & half hours for it to regen

[@STNGR4Y]

@@koekje00005 oh ok ty

[@TertorForss]

Optimizing is a lost art at this point, devs just go nuclear option assuming everyone has a literal fusion reactor in their basement powering their RTX 9990 Hyper X card from the future. Kudos for doing it and for the video in general, good stuff.

[@bimsbarkas]

Well, optimizing... This game still looks like quake, all he did was check a few boxes, and it should not even need shades or, realistically, a 3d accelerator, and should smoothly run on a 486. And I say that having graduated on a 3d programming project.

[@haniyasu8236]

@@bimsbarkas Okay one, you'd be surprised at how many will just not do that. And second... It does take time and effort to sift through these things, especially in a complex engine.

[@yancgc5098]

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@bimsbarkas Bro Quake 1 does not run smoothly on a 486 😭

[@TertorForss]

@ Yeah, that is the point because many devs skip ALL that little stuff that "doesn't make a difference" and just brute force it. Then they keep working on it for a year while asking full price for a beta-test and then release a "complete" version after suckering people with dlc's too lol. And some, most or ALL the little things are still forgotten.

[@aiden_obj]

PLEASE add an Easter egg so that we can enable to the audio or visuals for the shader comp loading screen, that’s hilarious😂😂

[@Splarkszter]

100%

[@dan_loeb]

yes, please!

[@ZaidaZadkiel]

signed

[@rosly_yt]

was about to comment this. I think that a 10x speed preview of the level is kind of a cool feature as well.

[@ZaidaZadkiel]

ah i know! record the entire audio of the gameplay and then edit it and shift its speed 10x so it sounds like chipmunks all the whole loadingbar

[@janetjane4861]

12:40 NO, KEEP IT! Maybe half the volume or something but this is hilarious and exactly in the spirit of older games when devs were allowed to have fun with their projects, adding silly elements in "irrelevant" parts of the game, just for the fun of it while solving problems like this. That always adds so much charm to a game and makes it feel more alive.

[@baltakatei]

*splines reticulate loudly*

[@IdentificadorNoDisponible]

An option to enable the volume of the loading screens would do the work.

[@caley1942]

its got that old multiplayer servers vibe where you would join the game and see only some random area of the map from one angle while you can hear random slashes from other players around the map not in your view 😆

[@DigitalJedi]

I'd love it if the loading message was randomized. Some others like "preparing level" or "building platforms" would be fun, but you could have a couple rarer ones like "beating the level for you" where you can both see and hear it, maybe through a low volume and by making the black background partially transparent. That way you can just make out the shapes and sounds of the level in hyper speed before being dropped in it.

[@awsomebot1]

I wish more devs thought like this. "My game looks retro af, so it should be able to run on potatoes" Tons of indie games with retro aesthetics don't seem to care for optimisation even if it's a simple shooter. Worse yet sometimes they'll force Unreal Engine's Lumen to achieve basically raster graphics we've had for decades. I guess it's their vision and all, but it seems dissonant with the graphics of the game how you need newer cards to run the thing. Glad you're going this route.

[@WretchedRedoran]

I have a sadly expensive potato of a PC, and whenever I get a game with a retro-3d aesthetic it's not terribly uncommon for it to run like absolute ass, and it always feels like such a burn.

[@iceblub]

fr

[@johnywhil]

the problem is, year 2016 pc is not a potato. a game that visually looks like form the year 1998 shouldn't barely run on 2016 super powerful pc (of course compared to 1998 hw). we'll talk about potatoes when it'll run smoothly on my smart toaster.

[@BRAINFOXINFINITE]

@@johnywhil Exactly. I had a crappy 2008 prebuilt back when I first started seriously messing around with PC gaming and even that was getting 1k+ frames in games like Counter Strike: Source.

[@Davavo]

An example of this is Gloomwood, it looks nice and retro but my potato is unable to get good frames when playing which is a shame

[@darkvulpes4826]

Okay, this is ridiculously genius and funny, like "My problem was, that shaders compiled on my machine since I've beat my levels myself. How do I fix it for new players? Okay, guess I just have to beat the level for them first myself too, every time." Like someone said in comments, it would be actually very fun option to just turn on preview of shader compilation sequence. PS: it's really cool to see your devlogs everytime, both interesting and very informative for other dev who just begin to do yheir stuff.

[@candybluebird]

I live for developers talking about all the ways they optimize their code. Also you should keep the sound on for compiling shaders. It is really really funny

[@xdanic3]

Agreed, it made me laugh so much when I heard it

[@ryan_1314]

It should be added as a secret option in settings that's just labeled something like "toggle loading screen tomfoolery"

[@ninjafish1504]

Unreal Engine game dev here - in principle you can select your renderer in the project settings - DX11/DX12/Vulkan. The engine uses a renderer abstraction layer, allowing the engine to call render commands without worrying about the implementation, and the Render Hardware Interface (RHI) layer converts it into commands in the chosen rendering api. That said, it’s often it’s easier to pick one and stick with it, as some material functions aren’t universally supported so increases the QA time significantly!

[@fearingalma1550]

...shoot, this is going to be an interesting problem for my project. I was going to use the Steam Deck as a performance target but Deck uses vulkan renderer and my computer for dev runs DX12 so it's gonna have to work on both...

[@kuhluhOG]

@@fearingalma1550 you should also be able to use Vulkan on Windows the only platform I know of where DX12 is supported but not Vulkan is XBox

[@alsonotraeon]

​@@fearingalma1550 vulkan should work on virtually any os.

[@steluste]

Omg thank you. I was little bit disappointed when I first launched your game because it run at 25-30 fps on my uhd 620 thinkpad. Now I'll be able to play it at 60fps wohooo Edit: for compiling shaders you can set camera fov to 180, detach it from the player spawn on different parts of the map and rotate it 360 degrees. I saw this method used by antii for his game Road to Vostok. You can check it out on youtube

[@Nate-bd8fg]

Rotate 180° lol

[@realskyquest]

Nice more fps, road to vostok its pretty good, but pretty buggy now after moving to godot(*rip the guy with godot 3d optimizations*) Godot is really neat for 2d, but 3d hurts. As a web developer I'm afraid of react and testing(*its a pain, but i still do it*)

[@steluste]

@@realskyquest I agree. Having good looks doesn't mean it's good at 3d.

[@sdsdfdu4437]

Which video did the road to vostok Dev talk about that?

[@SirRebonack]

You literally cannot have a 180° field of view with perspective projection.

[@davdav4804]

Your shader compilation solution is the embodiement of what gamedev feels sometimes, you look for the smart solution who will very elegantly solve your problem, but instead you can just brute force the thing in 5 minutes and get the same result ! I loved it !

[@Xeloph986]

I ran into the same problems with OpenGL and Vulkan when I launched my game on steam. I ended up just adapting all of my visual effects to look mostly the same between OpenGL and Vulkan and then exported both versions and set them as different launch options on steam. Imagine my panic when I launch the game on Steam and I immediately get bug reports on how the game just doesn't lauch 😭

[@Blargis3d]

Oooof this terrifies me lol. Might end up having to do this. Was your game Godot as well?

[@Xeloph986]

@@Blargis3d yeah it was. It ultimately came down to the fact that it's a retro pixel game. And like you said in the video, people expect to be able to run retro looking games on potatoes :D So yeah, setting up a Compatibility launch option or a beta option on Steam might be necessary to make sure everyone can play.

[@sulefur]

I'm following ultra engine development and they completely switched to opengl from Vulcan, while gaining performance on amd GPUs. They have a great vide explaining why Vulcan is terrible for development and how almost no games use it, lol

[@SilverDragonsmx]

@@sulefur OpenGL is functionally a dead end. Development has ceased entirely on it, and it will not see any improvements nor new features. As far as I can tell by the presentation (that also uses AI generated images, which as far as I am concerned is already a red mark against something, I also have no interest in watching a nearly 2 hour video that's functionally just someone going over a slideshow, so maybe something was covered there but not in the slideshow), with all the main arguments essentially boiling down to pointing at numbers entirely out of context, and pretending like a point has been made. (ex, Vulkan games in 2023 vs GlideFX games in 1999, which ignores that game development as a whole has changed since 1999) Also minimum system requirements for an API doesn't exactly mean anything - sure you can now "support" games on something as old as a geforce 420, but no one is going to be practically targeting hardware that old, meaning it's equally as valid to say "The GeForce GT 630 is the minimum support for Vulkan". Also OpenGL driver support is known to be sketchy at best. This has been well documented. Also the wording of "API drivers buggy" isn't a search term normal people will use. instead, "API driver issue" is FAR more likely to be searched, which shows 15.6m results for DirectX, 10.8m results for OpenGL, and 3.4m for Vulkan. (also the original search query gives completely different numbers, with exclusively DirectX being the only one even remotely close). As with any sudden and significant performance boost, I would sooner suspect a poorly implemented Vulkan pipeline over any actual benefit to switching to OpenGL.

[@froge4300]

@@sulefur vulkan is so much fun to use tho, also most new games use it

[@bobross9370]

16:30 You could create two separate builds and have them as launch options on steam.

[@biraw534]

Just like with r6. I noticed it, but I didn't know what was vulkan until now.

[@alexjay8867]

@blargis do this

[@alexjay8867]

@Blargis

[@007kingifrit]

this is not good advice. this requires the player to make choices and have technical knowledge. as a consumer i just want it to work, i don't want to plan things

[@biraw534]

​@@007kingifrit yeah I agree with u. When I played r6 first time I didn't know about it, and it tanked my preformance. Loking from this angle, I woulden't suggest it now.

[@normalperson397]

12:21 lowkey, that'd be a sick loading screen. Much more interesting than just seeing pitch black.

[@BluesM18A1]

Constantly finding barriers in your game's development that are tied to years old issues and pull requests on the github that are supposed to be fixed and merged in just the next update, that is just the Godot experience. Lord help us. But also thank you very much for making this video, best insight I've ever gotten on how I can apply optimizations as a fellow Godot developer.

[@Saas_1]

May I ask why you are using an engine that has the problem you just described?

[@BluesM18A1]

@@Saas_1 quite simply, because I am not smart enough to make my own engine yet. Even if I was, Godot would probably save me so much time that instead of sitting and waiting for bugfixes I'd be fixing them myself and sending pull requests.

[@bitnewt]

@@Saas_1 Other engines also have bugs, but the reports and discussion aren't as easy to find when they aren't open source.

[@RADkate]

@@Saas_1 the thing is with godot it will eventually get fixed but from i know of unity it just gets replaced by an equally broken system

[@deadfIag]

Unreal doesn't have *ANY* of the issues listed in the video, using Godot is literally just shooting yourself in the foot.

[@Fhormax]

I loved watching the devlog and seeing all the different techniques you used to optimize the game, from occlusion culling to shader compilation. 📊

[@jex8885]

This was probably the most interesting gamedev video I've seen yet, it's production grade information for polish, which is rare imo.

[@Speed001]

Oh i remember this video! You had the crazy loading screen easter egg. 12:36 Much better than the debate of whether people should add artificial loading screens.

[@blakkerr]

Having the game do a pre-recorded run for shader compilation is a really clever idea, even if a broader solution is coming for the next versions. For the AI/pathfinding optimization I had a similar issue, and what I found is to have a singleton responsible for all enemies, and have enemies queue into it to have their next update calculated (can be for path update, sensor check, whatever could cause an issue in large numbers). That way you can control how many calculations you want to per tick (could even adjust it dynamically based on performance), and guaranteed to not have any accidental overlaps.

[@sourestcake]

In my experience centralized data structures are the way to go for most things. It allows you to limit and batch work like that. But i do everything in C, so that probably has an impact.

[@acenio654]

Well I'll be damned. I just commented something really similar addressing the same point and just saw this. Hats off to you sir

[@ИапГоревич]

It's a more powerful tool than the one in the video

[@silkdragon47]

modern AAA devs need to do more of this kind of optimization. you are a god, and I am getting bloodtheif when it comes out just because of this video.

[@Joshimuz]

Hello, speedrunner here. I haven't watched the whole video yet and I'm in a rush but during the AI section you mention adding a random number to the AI's pathing tick cycle. Please seed this random number generator to the same seed everytime or the tiiiinnnnyyy amount of randomness this will cause will certainly screw TASes (and maybe super high level speedruns) forever. Thanks :P

[@Blargis3d]

Ooooh that's a really good point. Noted! Shouldn't be too hard to seed this

[@Joshimuz]

​@@Blargis3dNice, sorry to probably add another global variable to the pile :P

[@trentbillington1093]

@@Blargis3d It also has the potential to break your shader compilation replay!

[@rankail]

​@@Blargis3dit would be even better if you just count up the frame offset % 20. That would almost guarantee a rather even distribution of the calculation.

[@thepro4805]

i was thinking about how it would totally ruin TASes as well! lol

[@ExtraTrstl]

Thank you for this! I don't know how it's typically done, but knowing a game dev legit used out of date hardware to optimize for actually playing the game is outstanding.

[@GlassEye-er6rz]

Ohhh, I was just thinking today, "when are you going to release the video? " and then it comes out right in front of my eyes, enjoy watching it all

[@IDonotHaveAGoodName]

bro is doing more work than most AAA game companies

[@TavishMcEwen]

If you can get an id for each enemy, instead of generating a random number for each, you can instead use mod(id, 20) so the 1st, 21st, 41th, 61th, etc enemies will update on the 1st tick, then the 2nd, 22nd, 42nd, etc on the 2nd perfectly dividing the enemies up into 20ths for AI updates every tick

[@Blargis3d]

Whoah! I'm gonna use this. Also deterministic which is great for speedrunning and stuff

[@TavishMcEwen]

@Blargis3d idk what the mod function in gdscript/c# is but it just gives a remainder, just in case that wasn't clear

[@alphamineron]

@@TavishMcEwen I think everyone understands mod() unless you’re a high school kid. It’s basic maths and so common in programming

[@TavishMcEwen]

@@alphamineron you know what they say about assumptions

[@HALOHERO117]

@@Blargis3d could you possibly make a tutorial on how to make basic camera movements like the camera in your game on the player

[@prod.jasper]

this is fire watched the vid, played, got out of the map at the end the movement feels so good

[@Jungus1999]

Hey so with your Pathfinding optimization, it might be helpful to add your Knight agents to a queue and have a manager cycle the queue, invoking their pathfind() function on whatever interval you’d like. You’re probably already aware of this solution but I just thought I’d share since it helped one of my projects. Great video!

[@MURDERAXE]

Bruh, the compiling shaders work around is so fuhkin ridiculous it's hilarious. Nice work man.

[@Circle_boi]

Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:20 Occlusion Culling 3:03 Baked Lighting 4:27 Optimizing Enemies 7:17 Shader Compilation 13:40 Graphics APIs 17:22 Rapid Fire Optimization Tips 18:14 Ending & Results

[@J0rdan069]

What is th point of this?

[@SapkaliAkif]

@@J0rdan069 Maybe the commenter will go back to the video for spesific purposes.

[@J0rdan069]

@@SapkaliAkif Yeah, but these chapters are already in the video.

[@ultimaxkom8728]

Hmmm... culling, pruning, distributing, simplifying, and memoization.

[@SapkaliAkif]

@@J0rdan069 Ah, then maybe the comment was copied to the description afterwards.

[@Plikso]

0:06 "But for gaming,it's terrible" *start naming the components of my computer

[@c_ornato]

As someone who is doing a retro-style fps on godot using Qodot and who has the same performance issues, I can't thank you enough for the techniques displayed here

[@Oliepolie]

Youve been talking about all these advanced optimization techniques that ive realized now is literally every single thing I have to do while making maps for source in the hammer editor... entity culling, baked lighting, nav mesh optimization, etc

[@StephenBrown85]

This was a very well put together video - a lot of this stuff is not mentioned very often and takes a while to figure out!

[@Blargis3d]

I'm glad you found it helpful!

[@That_american880]

Just got done playing the demo and wow when the full release is released im immediately buying it the first two levels were very fun and I’m excited to see the rest of your journey

[@2004.HondaCivic]

Man I genuinely cannot thank you enough for these videos. Your 90s level design video introduced me to the trenchbroom + qodot pipeline a few months ago and I have never looked back. Bloodthief is coming along very well, best of luck

[@dominobuilder100]

Another optimization: The thing with computing the shortest path from multiple sources to one destination is that it can be reversed. Instead of doing a calculation for each source, do only one calculation from the destination to all sources and you will find the same paths (but reversed). This ensures that you do minimal work and don’t double calculate anything.

[@ZeroPlayerGame]

Unfortunately Godot's navmeshes don't really support this sort of thing - you'd have to roll out a lot of custom code.

[@dominobuilder100]

@@ZeroPlayerGame sure but shortest path is really simple to code so it will still be just a little extra work

[@ZeroPlayerGame]

@@dominobuilder100 no... on graphs maybe, but not on navmeshes where you have to deal with a continuous space

[@dominobuilder100]

@@ZeroPlayerGame ah ok I see

[@leongamin3834]

​@@dominobuilder100even if it would be possible, the amount of calculations wouldnt decrease

[@Hiasae-spue]

I think an alternative way to mitigate shader stutters could be to have a main menu background, where a camera flies through a sort of demo/secret level. This would look kinda old school and in line with your game art style.

[@FrozenDozer]

And then your main menu stutters and freezes like crazy. Not exactly ideal, lol

[@Aeduo]

@@FrozenDozer I wonder if shader compilation blocks the whole process or if the like, menu and player controls and stuff are on a separate thread from the main game, if the menu would stay interactable even if the scene in the background is choppy. It'd be noticeable but certainly not as big of a problem as ingame stutters.

[@L1vv4n]

@@Aeduo i don't know for sure, but if during stutter a GPU waits for shaider to process current frame it might be that decoupling menu rendering from the background render is too complex task. Like you will need two renders a separate frames, and than ask gpu to combine current state of both into one frame.

[@Aeduo]

@@L1vv4n I think this is kinda the point of something like vulkan though, where you can have some task going on while other stuff is happening and you synchronize tasks and allow stuff to continue or wait based on what tasks have completed or not.

[@ledark2512]

@@Aeduo asynchronous shader compilation exists, it waits for the shaders to be compiled before rendering, which solves the freezes at the cose that it may make assets invisible for a moment. I'm unsure that exists for Godot though

[@dappercthulhu4386]

Hey thanks for this. I'm pretty new to 3d game dev and your solutions to these problems will definitely influence how I approach my own projects

[@TRUFANATIC]

that's the greatest devlog! i learned a lot about optimization in godot, thank you!

[@Allsmilesguy97]

I think all that noise it makes during the compilation screen adds personality! I would leave it in fr

[@Allsmilesguy97]

Adds MORE personality i should say

[@Pope_]

As someone who has been forced to play some games at 20 fps for years, thank you so much for adding some of these optimizations. Specifically i want to point out the resolution scale options. Its relativly simple to implement but, from a players perspective, can make or break how fun a game is.

[@neipo]

yeah its great for a number of reasons, tbh w/ the aesthetic of the game I might run it at a lower resolution on my 1440p setup just for the ambiance lol

[@roadent217]

I find it curious how older games have so little detail that low resolution preserves a lot of visual clarity. I decided to play through Quake 2 RTX on my 4070, and at 1440p I would get ~85 fps at full GPU utilization ("but can it run -Crysis- Quake 2?"). But reducing it down to 1080p I got ~145-155 fps, which is perfect for my 165 hz monitor. I didn't feel any difference - something I couldn't say for modern titles, where 1080p starts feeling a bit fuzzy.

[@crumblesilkskin]

13:40, thank you for blinding me while i was watching in the dark

[@roadent217]

That screen has DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan, but, for the true blindness experience, it's missing SEGA.

[@Lowkeychilldroid]

RIP eyes

[@abdulwasay81]

I am so so happy that the KZbin algorithm brought me to this place, I watched all the devlogs and really really loved your videos but more the actual game. I got excited to know that I can play it for free right now and just played the demo and OMG those few minutes made my day. Most fun I have ever had playing a single player game in a while! Thank you and I wishlisted it ❤

[@SSukram_]

17:10 some steam games give you launch options when launching a game, often for different graphics APIs, you could make 2 versions and let the player decide

[@saber_]

That’s exactly what i was going to recommend

[@c.codyflick2210]

Re: compiling shaders. That's what me and my colleagues in the industry like to call a "spicy" hack. 👌

[@RR-om3zx]

You are so freaking smart. That stutter fix idea is crazy.

[@SittingLow-qs8rf]

That is literally the pc specs mine has too lmao. I only use it for coding so yea. Glad to see you're working hard for some system like mine!

[@ThiagoJaqueta]

Shader pre-compilation is an essential feature for every modern PC game. Glad to see it being implemented, even if it's done in a "unusual way" :D For your game, consider adding a integer scaling for resolution scaling, while also giving an option to disable the filtering. So players can play at 1/2 Res, 1/3 Res, 1/4 Res, etc... Prodeus added this option and I personally love it, even though my computer can easily handle the 1440p Native res, I prefer to play older games at 1/3 Resolution to get the those chunky pixels.

[@MaakaSakuranbo]

I found Godots reasoning there a bit odd? Fairly sure I've seen games that compile shaders on startup (e.g. Elite Dangerous) instead of only once stuff is seen at least.

[@soviut303]

Added to wishlist. While I'm sure the pathfinding randomization technique will generally give you a decent result, you could still end up with situations where most of the random numbers end up at the same time. A more bulletproof solution would be a simple queue you add enemies to. Every 20 frames the queue would advance and call the enemy's pathfinding routine. Additionally, you could have the pathfinding routine take a callback from the queue so that you could guarantee the last calculation was finished before performing the next. Maybe a bit overkill, but hey, this is a video about optimization.

[@rinkachi-rinkitata]

Developers like you keep my faith in game developers

[@krolmuch]

the biggest optimisation would not be using a python level scripting language for making a game though

[@rinkachi-rinkitata]

@@krolmuch assembly or c++ would give even more performance

[@sheepcommander_]

@@krolmuch "python level" bro does not know what he's talking about

[@krolmuch]

@@sheepcommander_ he uses GDScript inside the game engine. tell me how is it not python level language?

[@sheepcommander_]

@@krolmuch "Python level" is not a phrase that means anything, although it just occurred to me this might not be ur first language GDScript is a completely original language created to be closely integrated to the engine and it is also much much faster and just better than Python lol GDScript and C# have pretty much same performance if you use Static Typing on all your variables and methods

[@stinkyratman]

These are probably some of the best devlogs I've seen, really interesting stuff, thank you

[@nudiee]

0:59 the t-posing knights sliding towards you is terrifying

[@slavsit7600]

they doing the a-pose

[@iamlosingmysanityrapidly]

its an A-pose not a T-pose

[@VilasNil]

That's a nice jade roller you got there bro, so envious

[@Psicough]

I've been learing about game development for a bit and optimization is one of my favorite topics! So this video was like crack to me

[@ryan_1314]

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!! As someone who has a potato computer similar to the one in the video (gen4 processor, 8gig ram, no GPU I think) I'm glad you had a computer that bad in mind when optimizing. I'm no programmer by any means, but there's so many games I play that could easily have performance fixed with simple optimizations, such as enabling culling for more objects, staggering calculation times, reducing keyframes, not processing animations for objects out of view, or being able to toggle off shaders so potato PCs like mine don't have to process every object's ray tracing and motion blur. Literally just watching you optimize your game has convinced me to add it to my wishlist :)

[@leongamin3834]

Actually turning off animations isnt big optimization benefit, sure every little is good but to turn off as much dynamic lighting as possible was here probably one of the biggest Performance things. Also why the heck did he had dynamic lighting if basicly nothing could interact with it, such things are the reason for bad Performance. Also to make the pathfinding calculations dont happen on the same time only reduce short lag Spikes/time freezes. To make the calculations every 20 frames is a good thing. To the topic of culling, yes it is good but not really important because computers dont have anymore the Problem with drawing normal polygons. Here it is a thing of good models, if your objects are good, you dont use transparent textures and if you have the same object multiple times it uses only one draw call(a Signal that tells the graphic card to draw a object).

[@B3anBag98]

Great video, lots of insightful things and exciting to see progress, GGs ^-^

[@antonsimkin]

you are true engineer. i think its the first in a long time i saw someone talking abt optimisation.

[@ryanwillingham]

holy shit this makes me realize so that in so many instances when i've had a game stutter, it's the shaders compiling. saving this video even though i only work in 2d, this is super useful

[@jademonas]

your shader compiler is super smart! props also the shader loading sounds are AMAZING i need that

[@EthylJogodo]

your work is not only informative but also incredibly inspiring!

[@chambling8305]

16:33 why not just make an option to run on both? plenty of games (e.g. valheim) do this, and it would be way better for someone to play your game with broken effects than not be able to play it at all

[@ApocAnarchy]

Id agree if that was a thing more commonly done and likely still has issues? but still liking in case he takes the time to see it

[@linuxrant]

This is really really commendable. I am so glad, that you do not just make the game stylized as retro. But to a degree you make the game retro. That is actually something I really respect. The OpenGL issue, is sad, but understandable. although you could make the game support two renderers, but that would require additional amount of work. Best wishes.

[@awsmeanthony]

As someone with a potato I see this as a absolute W. Edit. I have a Vulcan specific potato so still a W.

[@SnijwitTv]

Honestly I like the audio during shader comp

[@ThePC007]

12:25 I actually really liked it when you could see the pre-recorded gameplay during the “Compiling Shaders” screen, lol. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a good way to make the loading screen less boring to look at since looking at a blank screen is incredibly boring.

[@glorytotheaprdeathtotheufl7917]

Would spoil the level tough (altough I agree it looks cool)

[@DynoStorm]

Should keep the audio, it's just funny :D

[@loycross]

This is probably one of the most interesting godot videos I've seen in the past year. Great explanations, interesting from beginning to end and it offered a lot of insight into the engine. Thank you so much for taking the time to document all this, I'm sure it will help a ton of people!

[@EinManU]

99% of modern game devs need to watch this.

[@Tynted]

Omg that solution to the shader compilation problem is hilarious 😂I second including a way to keep those sounds enabled while loading 💀

[@moeburhanimeez7354]

I love this GAME!

[@ct3000]

This is hilarious! Blood thief worked great on my PC and when I showed it to my little brother on his craptop from about 2015-2016 had the Open GL message, obviously I forced it, despite the terrible lighting errors he was happy with it! but now I know WHY it had those terrible lighting errors so thank you for making this video!

[@magichead3335]

12:12 thats such a cool solution

[@ViktorSarge]

This is both hilarious and highly useful. And the game is looking fun :)

[@eni1else]

0:36 it's a jade roller

[@TheCompleteMental]

Adding to the pile, dear god do I love how the compiling shaders screen sounds. Add an electric drill and handsaw noise.

[@blacklight683]

0:03 well my pc is a rotten lotato so you still got better

[@eamonmulholland3159]

Dude, this is the most interesting game dev video I've seen in a long time! Subbed

[@MasterTeeee]

Baked lighting will also make your finished product larger, in terms of memory. Same with OC. All these techniques have the side effect that you're effectively switching the cost from processing cycles to memory usage. One thing to bear in mind with this (amongst many) is that, processing cycles are effectively infinite, you'll always have more, you'll just drop render frames if there aren't enough available. Memory is finite, and if you run out, the kernel will either crash (panic), or kill your game, causing it to crash. Now, in a game of this scope, it's probably not a huge deal, but if the engine has memory leaks (and all engines/code has memory leaks somewhere) and/or your game code has memory leaks, or somewhere along the compilation chain there are memory leaks (you see where I'm going), then after some time, you'll start to encounter issues that are incredibly difficult to fix. I just wanted to clarify that what seems like magic, and to always be a good idea, does have some tradeoffs, and is something every engineer should be aware of. PS: Also, NEVER delete files/directories that you don't know what it does. Just rename the directory (add an _ to the start of it's name or something), or change the file extension (.old works well) and this will usually (there are exceptions) have the same effect as deleting it. Then, if you hit a castrophic, "I shouldn't have done that" moment, then you can just rename it back, even if you have boot Linux from usb or something.

[@chameleonh]

Golden advice here ^

[@someonespotatohmm9513]

It won't necisarily increase memory, just storage. The baked lighting could always be input as an ofset in whatever memory the calculated lighting is stored. Compute is also definitly finite, only 16ms!

[@PVTParts472]

props to this dude for actually giving a fuck about optimization

[@Butterscotch_96]

Funny how for 50 bucks more you can get a Steam Deck.

[@Shrewbloom]

shows how good of a deal the steamdeck is lol

[@jaemynbaer4504]

​@@Shrewbloommore like it shows how overpriced that laptop is😭

[@ZeroSleap]

I'm sorry but this whole shader compilation fix you did is amazingly innovative, and you could have it as a feature like. Your knight is kind of making a mental map of the level, and what will happen before they come back to their body so you ,the player , can do that.

[@gaurav7897]

And i thought it will be an actual potato

[@gavingotback5502]

lol i like the load sounds let that be an option to turnon loll! love small game devs and love code optimization awesome video!

[@UnwovenSleeve]

5:45 - You could optimise this further, by multiplying the base update interval (20 ticks) with the night's distance to the player. If an enemy is very far away, their navigation needs to be updated a lot less often; the distance a player can cover within the update interval is a lot less important to an enemy on the other side of the map, compared with an enemy about to stab you. The enemies pathing would be even more spaced out between each-other, not only increasing overall FPS, but reducing the chance of multiple enemies updating on the same tick, or even nearby within a few ticks. The distance from enemy to player would be updated on the same interval too, if not slightly before to space out calculations, that way you aren't replacing one problem with another. You could also create a second set of animations with significantly less information, as like an LOD for when the enemy is visable but far away.

[@WildGrowthJ]

Incredible editing and info! 👍 definitely chuckled.

[@smergthedargon8974]

3:41 Hot take: The left one is way better. Extremely better. So much better-looking.

[@pie19988]

Dude...I was listening to this while also working on a game and this was incredibly helpful...thanks

[@demex4548]

16:11 could it be possible to add at the start of the game like some games do a menu that allows you to chose which graphics api the game runs on ?

[@Parpleyt]

you no what The loading screen noise makes it sound like your doing stuff (I like it)

[@Saas_1]

You know that this video is basically just showing the core problems of Godot: Bad (rendering) engine, age old and not fixed (critical) issues and the "we'll just have to wait a bit more for the engine to become amazing" mentality.

[@endruv_2287]

Big fan of just recording a demo that runs during the loading screen. The game looks sick and I'd love to play it!

[@kunai9809]

11:55 you mentioned before that you randomized the path updating of your enemies, making your game not fully deterministic anymore. Could this not break this method somehow, that this input sequence doesn't work, just at a very small chance?

[@Igor369]

Yes, it will completely break the game demo files and make game demos impossible to record but he could just use screen capture to see where the game stutters so it did not matter. If he changes his mind he can always use pseudorandom number generator instead

[@sufferingincorporatedtm1781]

thats awesome dude, optimisation is a neglected area across software development these days. even some websites are bloated beyond belief. optimisation reduces e-waste! :)

[@MNenad]

I love the way you went into getting shader issues fixed

[@EdcrfQazwsx]

12:27 its actually so funny, you should leave it in the game

[@xbz24]

Your videos are cracking the matrix, keep it up with the good stuff

[@EdmondDantèsDE]

6:07 Why render them at all when they're not on-screen?

[@tiay6269]

it calculates what the ai do, not how they look on screen and you want your ai to keep moving when you are not looking at them

[@EarwormEngineAI]

Your solution for compiling shaders is brilliant!