EN/ Weekly News #146 (Patreon)

It has been a busy week, there has been a lot of progress on optimization and the 3D.

Sunny has recovered from her back problem, she finished the transition to 3D of a character and made them a new outfit.

Now let's take a look at optimization.

The core of the problem comes from the fact that, by default, the Unity engine puts all the game assets in the RAM when it starts.

So, we divided the optimization into two parts:

• Remove what shouldn’t be in the game's memory at launch.
• Create a system that puts into memory what the game needs, when it needs it.

So basically "Clean up memory" and "Manage memory".

We had to do a lot of testing to understand how all this works in the Unity engine (remember, neither of us are programmers) and see how to make it work for Sunrise.

We are getting to the end of the 1st task: Clean up memory. Currently we have gone from 5.73GB of memory at launch to 0.8GB. We still have some things to do to remove the last elements that should not be present when the game starts, but most of the gain is already there.

Note that this value is given by the Unity engine, the result will be different depending on the computer and it only takes into account the game's launch. However, we did a test and despite some small visual artifacts, Sunrise is now running on a 2006 PC with 4GB of RAM while consuming ~2.5GB of memory (in comparison, on our work PC, the game runs while consuming 0.4GB of memory).

So, optimization is going very well. We do not have a test version yet, we decided it would be better to wait until we have made progress on the second part. But all this is very encouraging for the future 😊

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That's it for this week. Don't hesitate to join the community on Discord. Have a good weekend and most of all take care of yourselves!

-Sunny & Zack