It's time to discuss the immediate prospects for the development of the project. I managed to set priorities and make a game development plan for the near future.
There will be no updates yet, as a full-scale reworking of the game is gaining momentum. This is largely due to a change in the main direction of the game's development. If initially, the game was designed only for short PVP battles in the style of "dogfight", then after analyzing the feedback from the first stage of testing, it became clear that PVP is not the only thing that players are waiting for.
In which direction will the project move
Now it has become clear that the game requires PVE content with ground equipment. Fighting with each other in dogfight is of course cool, but after a couple of weeks it will get and you will want something more stable and calm.
What's the plan?
1. Coordination optimization of the game
2. Multiplayer integration
3. Adding surface equipment
4. Adding an island and vegetation
5. Adding buildings and military bases
6. Adding ground equipment
The problem is that to implement this idea, it requires more performance from the game than it currently has. Even now, the game is quite heavy and it is not comfortable to play on weak devices, and we will still need to throw in a bunch of equipment and a detailed landscape with buildings and vegetation. From here we rest on optimization. At the moment, this is a stumbling block.
How to increase the performance of the game?
There are many ideas on how to do this and make planes fly more smoothly and predictably.
Of course, the ability to change graphics settings, enable and disable effects will be added to the game. This will make it possible to adapt the graphics to a specific device. Now the possibility of change has already been implemented:
- texture qualities (low, medium and high)
- object detail quality + effects (low, high)
- enable/disable post-processing (Bloom, color correction, etc.)
- enable/disable shadows
Next, I place my main bet on the implementation of the possibility of multi-scalable rendering. The main idea is to reduce the resolution of the renderer of individual heavy objects. For example, clouds or a landscape with a huge amount of vegetation, while leaving other, more demanding image resolution elements of the game, such as a 3D model of an airplane or an interface, in higher resolution or native. Thus, changing the resolution of opaque 3d models by 2 times can increase FPS by 8 times. It is difficult to talk about exact figures yet, but there are already some successes. I wrote about this in a note about optimization.
I completely got rid of the current implementation of clouds, because they are very demanding on hardware and look so-so.
Also, all landscapes will be completely removed from the game, since they now do not fit into the current realities at all. All this will be done from scratch, using new methods and technologies.
As you can see, there is a huge amount of work, but despite this, everything will be done in the best possible quality that I can afford. So don't be offended by the lack of updates.
BRAINSTORMING
Well, now I suggest everyone to start a joint "brainstorm". Come on guys, tell me what you think and how could everything be improved in your opinion?