a small update, releasing test build tonight

HI ALL! i apologise for disseapring but i decided to do some heavy optimisation, as I realised its performing way too slowly for a gameboy aesthetic game, i knew it wasnt the engines fault, but my own

IN engine playing, before doing all this i was barely hitting 30fps, out of engine 60-70 for a 2060 super that is unacceptable in my eyes and i knew i needed to do a lot of fixes many of which was done by lazy decision and i wanna deal with it early so i know not to later on.

three big problems

unceccesary lights

sprite3ds being surprisingly performant

and too many scripts

combined with smaller miscellaneous fix but there not important right now.

i didn't add more to the game as this was my biggest focus

anyways, lights, I completely got rid of lighting, instead relying on scene ambient colour for light, which produces a pretty good result for how simple the game is, so no lighting even baked everything only reacts to fog and raw colour of sky

sprite 3ds, are weird? they work pretty well have a lot of nifty features but are WAY more performant then mesh instances, its annoying, so i decided to change to that, and i discovered you can make an animation using the animation player, and use that to change the mesh texture between the four sprites, this alone before everything else quadrupled performance

and lastly scripts, every bush and wall had one, mainly to check if collisions should be on, and which animation frame speed to play, which to be known, is super unperformant and frankly overkill... so i got rid of this and that fixed up alot of the problems

overall, i went from an average of 30fps in the game engine to 470+ average with highs of 600 with my system, and note it will be even higher when built into a playable file

NOTE the forest or any forest scenes are the best stress test based on the amount of foliage that will be in it, to compensate to keep scenes equal, other scenes will be larger in size to explore before having to transition scenes vs forest scenes that will be shorter before having to teleport to a next section of a forest scene! this is the main way to make sure fps is "similar" to each scene but there no way to get it exact lol, Im gonna be basing it on the average fps in a scene and try to reach that goal with my system specs.

here is what the game looks like post optimization effort, not the final image as i can still add more foliage to certain areas.