Having learned what the actual bottlenecks were in the trial and error process of optimization, it was necessary to go back on some of the changes I did on Mission 1 outro that didn't really improve frame rate but took away from the experience. I've now combined the best parts of old version and new version, without compromising frame rate.

The changes of this patch have to do with character placements, dialog and objectives in that scene.

If you're interested in how the sausage is made, here's a blog post about various tricks and techniques I've used in Gust of Wind to keep the number of shadows, draw calls, dynamic physics objects and the overall number of polygons on screen to a minimum:

[gustofwindgame.com]ːsteamthisː

Pretty much all the points in the post have been in use for a long time, but here's a few optimizations added in this update:

• Terrain details (like rocks and trees) that are far away are more performant and look much better, because I changed them to "impostors" from low-poly meshes
  
• All doors that are not connected to the room player is currently in, are hidden
  
• A bunch of code optimizations
  
• Updating the water plugins used allowed me do improvements like disabling floating scripts from objects that don't currently need them, and disabling the water renderer when not needed (instead of masking it out from the camera)

I used Amplify Impostors plugin to generate "impostor" versions of terrain details, allowing lots of smooth looking rocks and trees with great performance. It's hard to see which rocks are impostors (the ones closer being just regular models of course), but that's what makes them great. The geometry of an impostor is just a plane, but they take their texture by picking the right one from an atlas with lots of views from that rock asset from different directions.
There are some bugfixes as well, but I have a hard time tracking which ones are for bugs that came up with the optimizations, and which ones are actual bugfixes to the previous version. I also worked on the overall flow of the third mission with small changes on some details regarding objectives, making it more enjoyable in my opinion.

I replaced the lightness indicator in HUD with a rim light for the third person perspective. The character is split in 8 parts corresponding the points in player that AI can see when they're lit, so that the rim light can be shown in those body parts separately. The indicator introduced in the previous update still remains in first person perspective. Here's a video of the rim light in action. As you can see, it adjusts to the color and intensity and changes in appearance depending on which direction the currently most affecting light source is.

Also, this video is a bit older so it doesn't have the rim light, but it shows some changes I did to the dialog in the second part of Mission 1 (mainly making the dialogs shorter while introducing characters one by one without much of going back and forth).

Added a lighting indicator that helps with keeping in shadows:
Other changes:

• progress in the first mission was sometimes blocked by a notification "Enemies know the door is open, loading from save". Fixed a bug that was causing this.
  
• fixed double music sometimes on in mission 3
  
• for mission 3, changed Behemoth layout a bit, added another guard, adjusted their paths, and made a bunch of bugfixes smoothing out this environment specifically
  
• character got stuck when jumping to shallow water
  
• sometimes lantern got extinguished just after lighting it
  
• character got stuck after canceling lighting lantern

The most visual change in this update is probably some layout changes I did for the interior of a huge frigate in the third mission. I split it into three sections divided by walls, so that only one section's contents need to be visible at a time, which helped a bunch with optimization. Here are some views of the renewed interior:
I also added a carriable horn that guards can use to alert nearest enemies on a radius. The player can use it too of course, if they wish to make a grand entrance or just want to see how the enemies react.
In addition, there are just lots of small bugfixes on the mechanics and missions, like the points below:

AI:

• fixed enemy door interaction animations not working when he's coming to view from a different room
  
• fixed enemies not following player to different rooms very likely
  
• enemies now wake up more easily
  
• enemies rotated suddenly
  
• enemies don't try to find weapons behind locked doors anymore (which was making them freeze)

Save/Load:

• bodies stay where they fell after loading game
  
• lit lantern wasn't lit after load, also the model is parented weird
  
• book was open when carrying after loading game
  
• fixed the character dropping to water when loading a save on boat

Interaction/Player Movement

• book's pages were blinking when turning page, and a letter's content wasn't visible in some cases
  
• fixed issues with lantern, like enemies not seeing with it, and the physics not working when carried by an enemy
  
• weapons can strike walls and make an impact sound
  
• falling ceased for the duration of flinching and two-handed attack
  
• Prevented carried torch clipping through walls with IK
  
• Prevented throwing grappling hook in tight spaces

Mission 1 pt2:

• figured out ways to make the scene optimized, while showing captured live enemies and dead bodies with numbers reflecting playstyle

Mission 2:

• level design tweaks, making it more optimized
  
• added some dead trees outside
  
• lighting improvements
  
• solved some problems with enemy visibility

Mission 3:

• splitting interior into 3 sections, updating the map
  
• added enemies inside cottages, improved the lighting and decoration in them

I made new vegetation models and textures for the island in the third mission, trying to match it close to the barren highland landscapes of northern Norway as possible.

Here's what the island looks like now:
If someone's interested in how the sausage is made, I added some time lapses of making the trees in the comments of this X post:
https://twitter.com/GustOfWindGame/status/1737552467456336033



I also made some progress in optimization. There was a CPU-capped moment in the second part of the first mission, where there are a dozen or so NPCs visible at the same time. It's the part I've probably spent the most time banging my head against a wall with, but I finally got a substantial increase in framerate by a very simple change in the hierarchy of the scene, following the instructions of this blog post in case anyone's interested: https://blog.unity.com/engine-platform/best-practices-from-the-spotlight-team-optimizing-the-hierarchy


The scene was clearly processor capped and a flat hierarchy without characters nested deep in other objects increased the frame rate on my minimum specs machine by about 40%. I also had to remove the rocking movement from the two ships containing the NPCs, and that might have contributed in the frame rate increase.

Playing through the campaign with my minimum specs computer, there are still
clear scenarios where the frame rate drops to 25 or so on the highest settings. However, I finally got rid of the worst performance bottleneck in the campaign so perhaps I can clear out these as well.


In addition to the decoration and optimization improvements, here are the bugfixes in this patch:

• Getting stuck while falling against a nearly vertical surface seems to be wholly fixed now, by changing the character to drop with physics in those situations
  
• Removed a stutter caused by repetitive landing animations when walking towards a rock, which made movement on rough terrain pretty annoying
  
• Frame rate was visible in corner when it shouldn't be, and version number wasn't visible in Main Menu after exiting from game, those things should be fixed now
  
• Bunch of smaller fixes here and there, fixing some small problems in assets and missions

To start off, a couple of visual improvements. The first one I did mainly for optimization reasons. The rigging of this frigate, the Seashell, used to have 82 separate skinned mesh renderers for ropes and such. I replaced ALL of them with line renderers and static meshes (allowing me to combine the static meshes into one big one). There was some improvement for performance, but less than I hoped, to be honest. Anyway, at least those chainplates I added to the sides as new additions look pretty cool. I did the same change also to a brigantine that's featured (as different variations) in both missions 2 and 3.

Here's a video showing some details in the revised ship: https://x.com/GustOfWindGame/status/1716875722172871132?s=20


Also, I changed the graphics of the objective elements:

List of other bugfixes / improvements:

• forced camera to be in third person when climbing (afterwards it resets to the way it was)
  
• If player had a grappling hook on shoulder while saving game, the rope of the grappling hook was spawned in the character's hand (as if he was carrying it). I fixed this, and also made the character add the throwable objects automatically on his belt, when you pick up an object with both hands being occupied. There are 5 slots for throwable objects on belt.
  
• in some situations player took damage when yanking back throwing hook after throw
  
• exploded doze grenade left behind a collider indicating it could still be picked up, even though it couldn't
  
• fist strikes didn't always land, now they do
  
• vaulting didn't work on slanted surfaces (ridge roof), made other improvements on it too, making vaulting all in all much more reliable and intuitive
  
• fixed a situation where character got stuck falling against a floor after climbing
  
• ensured NPCs being rotated to their walking direction, which didn't always happen
  
• M3 ship optimization (there was a big lag when going inside, got reduced greatly)
  
• Torchlights of enemies now show up however far in the distance they are (as a lightweight particle effect)
  
• fixed occasional weirdness in animations with choke from above for both player and enemy (although in some border case situations there are still problems with that)
  
• when the ceiling is low, thrown bodies no longer clip partly through the ceiling and leave there hanging from their head or arm
  
• there were still situations where switching between third person and first person changed the pitch of the camera angle
  
• first person camera doesn't clip to walls nearly as much. You can still get it to clip if you try hard enough, but you have to be doing something weird like looking down while pressed against the wall.
  
• improved ground check, should lessen the likelyhood of getting stuck on uneven terrain
  
• carried objects sometimes didn't get attached to boat properly when starting rowing, result in boat getting partly stuck by the object hovering in air, that seems to be fully fixed now
  
• when player drops in water while choking an enemy, the game no longer breaks
  
• camera was sometimes rotated weirdly when looking directly down
  
• if a weapon was in player's hand after loading game, enemy was able to fetch it in battle
  
• the mechanism of using winches on gratings was in a pretty poor shape, if it worked at all (I've kind of overlooked it since it hasn't been used yet as a solution to any puzzle). Now it should be quite robust, you can lower a hook by winching, attach it to a grating and open the grating by winching.
  
• Mission 3 has some unique situations where big groups of game objects are enabled at various stages of the mission (and the lighting changed). This has brought about some unique problems as well with loading the game, but I've now fixed the ones I've bumped into.

It's been a while since the last update, but since then, I've made some considerable progress with optimizations. Though there are still lag spikes on moments like opening doors, there are no areas left where the frame rate would be consistently below 30 with my GeForce 3070 with best settings and UHD resolution. Most of the time, it's around 40-50. And those lag spikes I mentioned have been greatly reduced too.

I'm planning to make a lengthier blog post delving more into the tricks I've done to reduce the number of game objects, triangles, shadows and physics objects at use at a given time, but until then, below is a short list of the changes I remember.

Also, here's a gameplay clip showing getting rid of the guards patrolling on the deck of the Behemoth in various creative ways. This large frigate has been one of (if not the most) straining places on the GPU (both exterior and interior). Frame rate on the deck now hovers mostly between 30 and 40, but remember that this is in UHD resolution with the best settings. Capturing specs are in the YouTube description.

Bugfixes:

• M2 escaped scarf that player has to follow no longer has the other hand fixed to carrying animation
  
• When starting to row immediately after loading save, camera got sometimes lowered to the water level at the start of rowing.
  
• M1PT2 lighting changes
  
• M1PT2 NPC placement changes to distribute them more evenly inside and outside for optimization
  
• When opening map, fixed the map resetting to the world map instead of showing the map last collected

Optimizations:

• Enemies far away are replaced with a non-skinned (non-deforming) low-poly model
  
• Terrains far from the player are replaced with a low-poly model with simple materials
  
• Same thing with ships - there are now separate low-poly versions for each ship that their whole complex game object hierarchy is replaced with when they are far
  
• Carriable objects are automatically disabled when they're in different room than the player
  
• Made improvements on how the enemies get hidden when in different room than player
  
• In proximity of books, there's no longer a framerate cost of the pages of the book being rendered (except in one frame)
  
• Improved the arrangement of clusters of game objects that get hidden when player is far in missions 2 and 3
  
• Rearranged the NPCs in the dialogue section after mission 1, so that there's not a huge number of NPCs on deck at once.