Sometimes it feels like weeks of two steps forward 3 steps back, sometimes YEARS feel like this. And yesterday it FINALLY felt like we took a step forward.

I was having a real nightmare of a time trying to get the build working. I had just spend the better part of a month pushing hard as hell to get these pooling systems up and running. And funny thing, now that I transferred to the newest version of Unity and cleaned up some systems, I'm finding WE DIDN'T EVEN NEED POOLING! The assets load so damn fast it doesn't even  matter! Who knows, maybe it ends up being worthwhile on very low end devices /shrug.

The only performance issues I am now still experiencing is a SLIGHT 1/5 second hiccup when getting near a loading zone the first time it's instantiated, and that touch lag bug with custom shaders from years back (that reminds me, i've been meaning to do a soak test, run the game on a phone for upwards of 20 minutes and see how bad the lag gets as it seems to get worse over time). 

But even with these performance hangs, the game is feeling REALLY silky smooth even on a web build running on a phone, and this ONLY happens on the phone build on web, so if you swap to an android build or play on PC there are no problems at all.

So for the first time ever, feeling really good about performance and what lingering issues ARE there, are largely out of our control. Maybe i’ll try to figure out what’s causing the small load hiccup later, but it’s hardly pressing (GAH DAMN IT THAT IS GOING TO WEIGH ON MY MIND TILL WE END IT THAT NASTY M*THER FUCKER BUG)

You know what, I just got a hunch what it might be. It doesn’t seem to be zones, there are no zone transitions where the lag spike happens, but there ARE a couple art heavy scene assets, a large green house and a water spewing round coral, that MIGHT be causing this.

NOPE! That certainly did not fix it after a quick test. Think i’ll add some debugs that give an alert when large areas are loading/ unloading, and I can see if that’s occurring in the same places. It’s VERY predictable where these hangs are occurring. There are specific areas where this happens, and now that i think about it more I recall this not happening when i disabled the unload system, so it DEFINITLY has something to do with that. But to my knowledge I’ve taken out all the intense logic that happens in a single frame, but perhaps there’s some nasty setting set up somewhere.

Going to go after this right as soon as we’re done with this blog entry. I want this system totally sewn up so we can push forward and get to the gameplay!

It’s crazy between all the sounds, music, unloading systems spawning fish, and various other mechanics, it can turn into a real PITA tracking down these issues.

Beyond that I’m super excited. I don’t know how many of you did this when you were a kid, but if you had a bowl of marshmallow cereal, sometimes I would eat only the non candy bits of the cereal, and after finishing up the bowl, we’re left with nothing but those sweet candies and you just get to scarf it all down. 

I lived a torturous childhood.

What we’ve been doing the past 8 years, is just gargling abject fucking shit. This has been an unrewarding hellride of nothing but tunings and fixings and polishings of everything until they were ready to go. We rarely indulged in putting together things that were working and done. We were always knee deep in the parts of the project that were the worst, always talking about what wasn’t working, what was broken.

There is so much cool shit that’s about to come online it’s going to be fucking awesome. And we’ve barely touched on these systems and mechanics over these years, but been obsessed with the stupid culture war that was keeping us down. But shit, can you blame me? The entire world was more than happy to demonize and destroy everyone else, because they were too cowardly to admit they MIGHT be a TINY bit wrong about literally anything and everything.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THAT!

Nothin’ ta’ do but get to work anyhow. So first order of business is to eradicate the last of these performance issues. If that goes well, we move on to getting more items online. Then all we have to do is add some fish, add some areas, and we’ve got ourselves a demo on our hands!

Will it be perfect out of the gate? Not even close. But I’m excited how fast this game will improve and grow in the near future. All this hard work is FINALLY in place, and getting this build up and running was the last bit of the puzzle.

The sharks had FRIGGIN’ LASER BEAMS attached to their FRIGGIN’ HEADS this whole time, you DENSE M*THER FUCKERS