Timeline updates (Patreon)

Because of some optimizations, lighting bugs and level transition problems the timeline of releases for the Alpha and Beta has changed a bit.

We've run into a couple bumps in the road with lighting in a couple levels, nothing serious of course but something that does need to be worked on for optimization so good performance is possible with lower level graphics cards. It's possible I could put out an alpha in the next 2 days, but with the nature of the bugs and the performance hit it could have in certain situations, I would rather have a fairly stable build to show for the alpha instead of a buggy first impression for the majority of Patreon. So because of this I've decided to push back the release of the alpha and beta a bit so these can be worked out. These will be the new estimated releases for the Alpha and Beta:

Alpha: January 15th

Beta: February 20th

I appreciate everyone's patience and consideration so much while I get these worked out and I can't wait to release a stable Alpha build for everyone to get a taste of Subliminal😁.

For anyone who would like to know a bit more about the bugs and optimizations we're facing right now, here's a bit more of a detailed picture: So far all of the lighting for the game has been done with Lumen which is a very new bleeding edge lighting system made by Unreal in UE5. Lumen gives basically indistinguishable results to Raytracing with a very much reduced performance impact. This is great, but can suffer when a lot of small meshes are crowding a scene. An example of this is the play structures in Level 18, which when lit with Lumen gives a very significant performance hit. For scale, this is no problem for an RTX 3060 which still gets around 70-80 fps but for most people it means considerably laggy gameplay. There are a couple options I'm exploring to fix this: #1 is a redesign and combining of a number of meshes across a couple levels to make Lumen more performant and #2 is a look into baked lighting for certain levels. Baked lighting would mean a VERY big jump in fps for older PCs and was planned for the full release but might be worth getting sorted out now even for the alpha to keep everyone able to play the game at 60+ fps. The other route with some mesh redesign to keep Lumen the only lighting option would be ideal but both will have to be looked into a bit more in the coming days to see what the best option is. In addition to this there are a couple minor level transition bugs that need to be fixed before the releases

Thank you again to everyone for your patience and support ❤️

I also have some ideas for the Alpha on how it will release and what it will contain and I want to get some feedback from you guys so I will be posting a couple polls in the next day or 2. Stay tuned 😁