Station siege - Devlog #6
This time I spent my hours optimizing the game, mainly because the game was borderline unplayable to work on.

The map had ~90 live CSG collision shapes constantly recalculating in real time. I baked them into static geometry.

Also, I swapped out the majority of 3D models in the map, which were absurdly overbuilt. Most had over a million faces, while one was sitting at ~3 million faces for a single 1x1 meter window.

The editor is noticeably faster now.

Another huge change was the map. Now it is a tube-like corridor connected to a polygon with 18 sides. There is also a small room connected to the ring. This ate up most of my hours.

A small yet meaningful thing was the lighting overhaul. I pivoted from flat, evenly lit corridors to nearly dark chambers with higher contrast and isolated pools of light. Moreover, I added flickering animation to some of the lights so there’s some variety.

Last thing is the new HUD. It’s not final yet; I will likely iterate multiple times before settling on the ideal one. However, it’s a noticeable upgrade from the previous flat white text on the screen.

What I’m most happy about is still the optimization. My laptop isn’t particularly a RAM titan, so this is really important for me. I think this will ripple into other areas of the development and speed things up a lot.