Hello! And once again in touch with you are the developers of Men of War/Soldiers:Heroes of WWII with our the new project - Soldiers: Arena. At this time, we will talk about the of games’s optimization. It is no secret that the low FPS turns intense dynamic battles into turn-based boring slideshows, that gets your eyes tired fast. Taking into account the characteristics of the game’s type of synchronization, where each individual event occurs for all players at the same time (as we wrote in our previous diaries), the question of optimization comes important. But the optimization itself is quite extensive work and consists of many factors. Let's look at some of them separately.

Code optimization

Part of the work in this direction has already been done for the BoE: 1914-1918 project, developed on the same game engine Gem 2. The creators of the game desired to realize large-scale battles of the First World War and these led to the fact that the average number of soldiers and equipment on the battlefield is double times higher than in the Men of War. So first of all, our programmers upgraded the rendering system of units, which should take into account this feature. Furthermore, they added some useful graphic features from the new engine Gem3 into Soldiers: Arena, and transferred functions for optimization of graphics calculations from there (e.g. restriction for drawing particles while a large number of special effects on stage). Game works much more fluiudly, while the visual quality of the picture is not affected.

Configuring the the appearance of objects, map levels, lods

As mentioned earlier, we are implementing a more detailed models and special effects into the game, using the high-resolution textures. Their proper configuration and optimization lay down as a heavy burden on the professionals in relevant departments. It concerns also to the configuration of distances at which objects begin to appear in front of the camera, and configuration of the distances, at which models are replaced by lower poly iterations, and the creation of simplified models themselves.

Automatic adjustment of maps and modes for the number of players

One of the Men of War multiplayer’s problems is unreasonably large number of maps, designed for a different number of players. Some maps have turned out more successful, some didn’t fully meet the needs of the gameplay. This led to the fact, that the actual number of used maps was small, and the choice, what map to play wasn’t determined by its quality, but the number of players in the session. In Soldiers: Arena, we decided to reconsider the approach to the creation of maps: now each of them and each game mode adapts to the size of the team. The excess part of the area cuts off, spawn and capture points (flags) adapt to the size of the gaming session. This approach solves several problems: makes optimum use of the map, cuts unnecessary objects, thereby increasing performance, simplifies the process of searching and creating of the game session. And as a bonus - saving team’s resources and directing its efforts to create better maps to the suit the numbers.

Game camera improvements

Game camera in Soldiers: Arena is now behaves a little differently. Unlike other games in the series, where the scrolling of the camera with the mouse wheel moved the camera in a straight line relative to the center of the screen (zoom in/ zoom out), now it will move along a trajectory specified by the player by setting the desired tilt angle. For example, no one now will not prevent you to manage your units from a third person - you need only tilt the camera to the desired angle, then you can easily switch to a strategic view and back by using the mouse wheel. Do you like to do things the old way? No problem: set the camera almost at right angle to a unit, and it will behave as before. You can see here, how it works: https://youtu.be/Q4KVKUNgItM Such camera work allows us to solve a number of unrelated problems: increase the ease of operation, reduce the number of objects simultaneously entering the screen, thereby speeding up the drawing of the scene, and correct the imbalance of the bird's-eye view (when you could see the half of the map, zooming out at maximum). And as an extra candy, we have changed the visualization of the sky and its interaction with the fog limiting the vision of the map. Map’s borders look more natural now. It is worth noting that ALL the innovations relate directly to Soldiers: Arena. Classic Men of War’s multiplayer, which we include in the project for the fans of the series, will be, as promised, unchanged. Classic means classic!

[ 2016-02-25 19:08:45 CET ] [ Original post ]