Supporting the potato PC

Many people don't have insane $1,000+ gaming PCs and often they are forgotten. We want to make sure Don't Sink can run on any potato, even old ones. This update brings two new video settings which we will discuss below!

Lighting LUTs

LUT stands for Look Up Table and all it really does is take the color of a pixel and convert it to another color using the LUT as a guide. This allows us to render vibrant scenes using nothing besides a texture and a single shader. It is extremley performant but there are two weaknesses. A single LUT (for example our morning colors) require a 4096x4096 (48mb) image to be kept in memory. When it is drawn the GPU takes a bit longer (when compared to other sprites in the game) to draw the image due to its size. For a slow GPU a single LUT can be fairly expensive to handle. When transitioning between various times of day, two LUTs are drawn per frame. This means the LUTs are even heavier at times. There are two settings available for LUT Lighting:

• Disabled - LUTs are cleared from memory and are not rendered
• Enabled - LUTs are kept in memory and are rendered

LUT enabled shown on the left, disabled is shown on the right.

Parallax Detail

Parallax details are shown in the background and currently include passing ships, clouds, and light rays. At a glance these don't seem like they would hinder performance however due to the size of some images the various sprites are on separate texture pages which results in three additional texture swaps. Aside from the cost of rendering, the details also require a tiny bit of processing power to update their various logic. There are four settings available for Parallax Detail:

• Disabled - No details are generated or rendered
• Low - Only passing ships are enabled
• Medium - Passing ships and clouds are enabled
• High - Passing ships, clouds, and light rays are enabled (and anything else)

New content & features

• LUT video setting added, disabling will remove the LUT textures from memory and prevent the LUT shaders/rendering to be performed
• Parallax video setting added, non-required textures will be removed from memory and various details will no longer appear

Minor changes

• Each island is now more/less effective from each source of profit so that trading, mining, and farming aren't the same
• Auto-feed is now more efficient
• Tooltips function like text boxes now
• Crew stats reset on islands
• Storm random event only damages sails
• New quest pop-up stays around too long, reduced by 30%
• Sleep margin timer changed from 1ms to 10ms, this should cause the CPU to stay saturated and avoid power-saving related performance issues

As always... stay salty sea dogs!

Team Lead / Lead programmer Sebastian Nigro (Seabass) Twitter Artist / Visual design Daniel Marques (Thirteen) Twitter Audio / Web / Programmer Chris Anselmo (Topher) Twitter Official Website Trello Page Discord Server Reddit

[ 2018-01-28 09:33:41 CET ] [ Original post ]