Restitched: Developer Diary | Optimizing Graphics (Patreon)

Welcome to a new Developer Diary! This time around we'll be diving into the game's graphics settings and touching on how we optimize art for performance.

Sound like your cup of tea? Grab the biscuits, and we'll dive right in!

Graphics Presets

Restitched currently offers various graphics settings, such as Low, Medium, High, and Max. The purpose of graphics settings is to optimize the game for your hardware and reach a balance between visuals and performance.

What do graphics presets look like in Restitched, and how do they work?

Low

The lowest graphics setting turns off or reduces the more intense effects, such as shadows (which are heavily demanding). It also reduces the texture quality to an eighth of the original version. Shadows in this mode are more pixelated and harsh, with no fading effect and only render close to the camera (such as in the playable area).

Medium

Medium is a great preset for those looking to keep the game running well on lower-end hardware while still getting some of the nicer visual settings. Reflection probes are not real-time (like with Low), anti-aliasing is reduced, shadows are lower quality but still support fading effects, and texture quality is a quarter of the original resolution.

High

Placing the game on the High setting will give you most of the benefits from Max, but with a few reductions to squeeze in extra frames. You'll notice shadows being a bit lesser quality, anti-aliasing slightly reduced, and textures at half the standard resolution. Overall, this mode is great for those with mid-tier hardware looking to favor performance.

Max

Restitched is not an extremely demanding game and is being built with optimization in mind. As such, the Max graphics mode is the ideal version to play on if you have any semi-recent gaming GPU. This mode favors complex shadows and unlocks all texture resolutions to be the same as we've imported it (often a max texture size of 1024 or 2048).

Restitched is still in early development as of this post. Naturally, we'll continue to optimize the game, adjust graphics presets, and later decide which hardware is best for minimum and recommended specs.

If you're looking for a few extra frames at the cost of visuals, lowering the graphics preset is the way to go. We don't have support for a custom graphics preset right now, which would allow the player to configure each setting to their liking. However, this is on our list of goals!

How are Restitched backgrounds optimized?

The environments you see behind the level are carefully designed by our artists and stress-tested by our programmers. Because of our early development stages, we aren't at the point of further optimizing these. Optimization is often something done near the end of development, which is the same in our case when it comes to environments.

We do, however, already use a few techniques to optimize performance in our backgrounds. For instance, we use a low-resolution texture for objects far away from the player. These textures are rarely less than 256x256px, and rarely higher than 512x512px unless it's very close in gameplay (such as the level floor or fences in the farm).

When things are further away from the camera, graphics settings and artist choice may decide if shadows are rendered or not. We also disable collision for things you'll never interact with. Background models that are never meant to be used by the player will often share a UV texture map with other models also in the scene.

One of the other techniques is to make things hollow and cull back faces. If you never see the back of something then there's no point in rendering it! This is also true for all Building Materials in levels.

Props, however, don't share these techniques. Restitched offers creators the ability to turn any Prop into an 'Ornament'. This removes collision and allows the mesh to be freely rotated and parented to anything you place it on. Traditional level editor Ornaments cannot be placed on Stuffy.

Why doesn't Restitched use a LoD system?

Because the game is 2.5D and already fairly optimized, loading various versions of a mesh based on graphics settings and camera distance isn't necessary. Traditionally you would see Level of Detail (LoD) in 3D games where you can gain some distance from things. This is important because you don't want to waste precious resources loading a super-detailed bush that you can barely see from several yards away.

For Restitched, everything you need to interact with is already directly in front of you somewhere within the gameplay zone. It's not very intensive to load hollow geometry meshes (Building Materials), and any Props you see are likely already optimized for gameplay. Performance may vary based on the background you choose for a level, but we do our best to simplify and optimize these without a LoD system - as they're at a distance and often blurred.

Ambient Occlusion

Restitched uses two forms of ambient occlusion (AO). The first is a custom solution integrated directly into our voxelized lighting system (more on that at a later stage). This is a cheap but effective way to create soft shadows in crevices within the layered gameplay zone. This method does not extend outside of the gameplay area.

The second method is a post-processing effect using "Multi Scale Volumetric Obscurance". We directly tweak the intensity, color, thickness, etc. to make sure this looks right for each background and Restitched overall. This method affects anything you see, as it's based on screen space.

Formerly we used a method called "Scalable Ambient Obscurance", but recently changed it. We felt this method was too harsh in the wrong places and gave the game a more comic-like feel. It had less of a depth-based shading effect and instead made corners and edges too dark and unrealistically lit.

Just for comparison, this is a comparison without any ambient occlusion:

That's all... for now!

Thank you for tuning into yet another Restitched: Developer Diary! We hope to cover many topics of development with these posts, and we're sure there's one for everybody!

Remember, some things shown are not representative of the game's final quality or content. We'll surely continue tweaking, renaming, and changing things until they're just right!

See you in the next one!