099 Trailer Subtitles & Xbox One Optimisations
Monday 13th May 2019
9:10am
In the office after the school run. I need to make a quick tweak to my trailers first thing (I have to add the Content Descriptor to my ESRB rating and tweak some end slate grammar) as well as make a subtitle file for it, neither of which should take long.
After that, from today on wards I am focusing on making the game run as smoothly as possible on Xbox, meaning lots of testing, profiling and trial & error.
1pm
A good session so far. The trailers are all sorted, and I’ve spoken with Xbox about getting it published on the ID@Xbox YouTube channel. I also ran through every single map (Time Trial) and did some quick Battle Mode tests on every map, recording benchmarks for the FPS and making notes on any performance issues (plus any further bugs I spotted). After lunch I can then start tweaking things and re-testing to see where gains can be made.
Time for some food!
1:30pm
The school has just called and my daughter is unwell so I’m off to collect her.
2:30pm
I’m back in the office, the little one is all tucked up in bed and dosed up with meds bless her.
5:30pm
A pretty satisfying afternoon. I determined one of the most significant causes of performance problems on the Xbox, that being the way we’re handling Terrain Details. With some jiggery pokery I’ve managed to resolve this already, with the scene I was testing in going from the initial benchmark of ~40 fps, to ~60fps which is awesome! My next task is to roll these settings out to all other scenes.
After that I really want to solve an issue I’ve been seeing where the game will randomly start to stutter for a brief period before settling down again. I’m convinced this is the Garbage Collector kicking in, but according to my profiling I’m not generating any….so I’ll spend some time trying to figure that one out. I also need to do some testing with 4 players to see how much difference that makes to performance.
Stopping for some dinner and to cut the grass (#grownUpChores)
8:35pm
Back in the office
11:55pm
And I’m done for the night. I’ve updated all of the terrains on all of the levels with the new optimal settings. I also fixed up all of the issues I saw whilst testing (things like smoothing out the terrain, refining some of the painted down textures, etc etc). I’m running off a build for Xbox but will deploy and test in the morning to see where we’re at.
The two big things to do tomorrow are still a) trying to determine just what is causing the occasional stutter in performance and b) seeing how the game runs with 4 players running around. If I get time I also need to update our website / press kit with our new Must Dash Amigos logo (plus anywhere else it appears), and start drafting some emails in preparation for our official announcement press release.
Adios amigos!
Signed by my face
