Update #15 (Patreon)

It's been a while since our last update! Let's catch up with what's been going on under the hood...

Highlights:

• Level 309! Atmosphere Improved and Optimized (Details in "The Details" at the bottom of the post)

• More DLSS Settings! (Much more control over Performance vs Quality)

• Level 566 (The Factory) foliage optimization.

• New Level development started... (Details in "Coming Soon" section below)

Coming Soon:

• Trailer 2! (We're super excited to announce Subliminal's official Trailer 2! Coming to all social media Soon!)

• Level 309 (Leaks planned for July 16th & 18th)

• A few Dev spots available soon! (We're starting to expand our Dec team a bit finally! If you are interested there will be a post here soon with details on how to get in touch with me (The Current Dev)😁)

• New Level! (Leak and Hint Coming on July 17th...)

• New Level Poll! (Coming to discord July 20th!)

The Details (for nerds):

Alot of optimization work recently! Specifically Instance and foliage optimizations. 

Foiliage is beautiful. But with UE5 it can get quite heavy with huge amounts needed for realistic grass, weeds, vines, brush, trees, etc :/ So let's get started! First thing we need to get to here is nanite, which can be a massive performance help with trees and brush (especially with trees/brush with 1mil+ verts), and also give us some very nice far shadows with grass and weeds instead of relying on billboards. 

Now let's get to some actual optimization! Our main method here will be breaking up our bigger, more intensive Foiliage (trees and brush) into individual peices which can each Toggle their settings themselves based on where they are in the players viewport and and how far away they are. To do this we're going to take a Tree for example, convert it into a blueprint and create a low load system that will switch between a few settings configurations. Then we'll call each of these configurations based on: First if a part of the tree is in the veiwport (we'd completely Toggle the tree here unless it is close enough to cast a shadowing the players veiw) and second we'll Toggle settings configs based on close the tree is to the player. After a bit of tweaking this method brings a huge performance boost and brings trees and brush down to around the same performance impact of smaller grass and weeds!