New Demo Build

We have been reworking things in the background with new grapple mechanics and visuals. We still have art assets to finalize and levels to adjust but at least there is enough complete to publish early.

Epic Online Services

We are integrating Epic Online Services into Ink to provide us with a better service backend. Logging in is optional and doesn't change the game; it will mirror your Steam progress (achievements, stats, etc.) over to your Epic Games account if you do login.

Engine Update

Unreal Engine has been updated to 5.0 to bring performance improvements and allow us to switch to deferred rendering. Along with the engine update is a rewrite of the game mechanics to take advantage of Unreal Engine's Gameplay Ability System.

[ 2022-07-21 19:56:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

In this update we have updated the engine to UE4 4.26 which has enabled us to use a new loading system which has been optimized for SSD's. This should result in faster load times in general. There is also a fix included that should help prevent a crash when loading a large scene for the first time which shows an error message similar to: GameThread timed out waiting for RenderThread after 120.00 secs

[ 2020-12-30 21:12:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Over the last few weeks we have been working on a lot of different parts to improve things. There should be some overall performance improvement and there are some Quality of Life changes as well.

Rendering Path

We changed from deferred shading to forward shading which has improved performance in our tests by up to 6 milliseconds (ms) in some places. The target render time for us is 11ms (roughly 90fps) so that it remains as smooth as possible for different devices even if a device has a lower target framerate. The reflections will be noticeably different as we cannot use Screen Space Reflections however they were causing artifacts that we were not happy with; there are still reflections but they are less mirror-like. If there are frame rate issues then try turning on the Async Projection in SteamVR (also known as motion smoothing) to see if that helps.

Controls Rework

The controls have been adjusted so that the jets will propel you in the direction that you have the controller pointing at. We changed the grapple hook system to be less of a hook and pull system (like Widowmaker in Overwatch) and more of a swinging system (Spiderman, Windlands, etc). Lastly, we added thumb-stick turning for Oculus devices.

Audio

The majority of the music has been finished and placed in the final game which means the level tracks have been changed so the music that has been in the demo level has changed to another one (don't worry, the original track is in a different level). Sound effects are still being worked on but will be in the final game.

Crash Reporting

Up until now the crash reporter sent the reports to Epic Games which may have helped them if it was an engine related crash but we were unable to view them so if it was a game related crash, we wouldn't know. Now they are re-routed to our crash event handling back-end so we are able to view them and forward them to Epic if we are not able to fix it. The only data that will be sent to us is your machine specifications (OS, CPU, GPU, RAM, etc), a mini-dump\call-stack that tells us what broke and where in our game specifically (nothing else), and the install location of the game (e.g. D:/MyGames/Steam/SteamApps/Common/Ink). If you do not want us to have this information then click on "Close Without Sending", or the equivalent, when the crash report window shows up however we will not receive any information and cannot take action on it. An example crash report call stack (from intentionally crashing the game): Ink_Win64_Shipping!AActor::SetActorLocation() Ink_Win64_Shipping!AInk_MenuCharacter::BeginPlay() [D:\UnrealProjects\Repos\Ink\Source\Ink\Private\Player\Ink_MenuCharacter.cpp:49] Ink_Win64_Shipping!AActor::DispatchBeginPlay() Ink_Win64_Shipping!AWorldSettings::NotifyBeginPlay() Ink_Win64_Shipping!AGameStateBase::HandleBeginPlay() Ink_Win64_Shipping!AInkGameModeBase::StartPlay() [D:\UnrealProjects\Repos\Ink\Source\Ink\Private\System\InkGameModeBase.cpp:30] Ink_Win64_Shipping!UWorld::BeginPlay() Ink_Win64_Shipping!UEngine::LoadMap() Ink_Win64_Shipping!UEngine::Browse() Ink_Win64_Shipping!UEngine::TickWorldTravel() Ink_Win64_Shipping!UGameEngine::Tick() Ink_Win64_Shipping!FEngineLoop::Tick() Ink_Win64_Shipping!GuardedMain() Ink_Win64_Shipping!GuardedMainWrapper() Ink_Win64_Shipping!WinMain() Ink_Win64_Shipping!__scrt_common_main_seh() [d:\agent\_work\63\s\src\vctools\crt\vcstartup\src\startup\exe_common.inl:288] kernel32 ntdll If the game crashes without showing the crash report window, it has been our experience, an issue with SteamVR and was fixed by restarting SteamVR then launching the game again.

Future Updates

We will be working on an updated tutorial level as the current one was designed for the old controls (the text has been updated though) and more sound effects so keep an eye out for that.

[ 2020-11-24 02:20:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

In this update a few things were tweaked to hopefully reduce the load times in the game and updates to the tools which may or may not improve general performance.

• UE4 4.25.3->4.25.4
• C++ compiler updated to the latest stable release
• Removed unused materials (A grand total of 50 core materials are used)
• Merged materials where possible (reduces shader permutation)
• Tweaked some mesh sizes to reduce memory usage
• Level One memory usage improved
• Shader caching optimizations (more specifically asynchronous compiling)

[ 2020-11-13 07:54:22 CET ] [ Original post ]