They’re still on track for May release. My guess is it will be very late May though.
That’s still awesome.
I know the owner of the studio making the game and had a nice conversation with him the other day. For the most part, the game as players will experience it is in place. They’ve been working mostly on trying to optimize the engine for much of the past year. They’re using Unity, which is making it a giant pain in the ass. Not that it cannot be optimized, but that they don’t have access to the Unity source code, so they’re pretty much trying to optimize and improve a black box. Anyhow, they’re optimistic and excited.
The guy from Fortresscraft Evolved had many of the same issues and has worked wonders over the past year optimizing his game. It’s been interesting watching his coding live streams and patch notes as he deals/rages with Unity. Instanced rendering was a big one that was implemented but caused no small amount of pain to get working because of the whole ‘black box’ factor.
It’s interesting how many projects over the past year have switched from Unity to something else.
I’d like to read more on this. Do you have any links or specifics? The performance in Subnautica have been just treacherous so it’d be interesting to see how someone moves to a different platform. I found it odd that Slitherine decided to move from their own engines to Unity for the Shenendoah games.
The System Shock remake team just announced their engine switch yesterday.
Other recent switches were:
Astroneer
EVE: Valkyrie
Little Devil Inside
Mordhau
Squad
Loading Humans
ExtroForge
Republic Sniper
I’m sure there are more.
It’s a common point of discussion here this year. The universal story is: it’s really easy to get started and it’s easy to build for various platforms. However, when it comes to debugging engine problems, you get zero support unless you fork out $100k/yr for the Enterprise license. Most teams don’t budget for that and/or simply can’t pull it off. For the long-term commitment, it’s cheaper and more convenient not to be working with a black box.
Did they fix the kelp forest lag that happens after several days of play yet?
Here’s a nice look at the art in Subnautica:
It wasn’t necessarily the kelp forest as much as the game trying to remember everything you changed or collected. The insanity is the game reading thousands of individual 1kb files as you move, it charts each piece of mineral you picked up, or stuff you dropped, or active state of your base and sub which are never turned off as far as the sim is concerned, whether you’re using them or not. The more you did the more bogged down it got. Hopefully they found a way to code around this besides just dumping terraforming.
The frame rate lag seemed to happen in the kelp forest areas, yet in fairly plain areas it was fine.
Still, whatever the cause, they really do need to fix it before release.
27th :: Subnautica General Gameplay Discussion
Obraxis [developer] 18 hours ago:
We ran into some problems related to the Skittles issue (Unity bug) which we had to work around. We’re now looking at Friday/Monday release.
May is almost over! :(
Looking at their Trello map, 1.0 has been pushed back even more, to September/October 2017.
Looks like the performance issues are giving them grief:
May: Unity in-house performance help?
August, September, October: Tons of performance work
The new Silent Running (Cyclops) feature is available in Experimental Mode now, not sure how long it has been. This interested me enough to fire up another new game, only I quickly felt disinclined to grind and I’m not Cyclops capable just yet in this incarnation.
Here’s a fairly spoilery demo from a player I found in the subreddit. The AI’s “creature attack” messages refer mostly to Lava Larva, which are essentially just strong parasites that, while not really dangerous to the player directly, attach themselves to the hull and leech power/cause fires.
I think the HUD changes look really good based on watching this, and they packed a lot of new buttons in there (for Subnautica). The new features also look complicated compared to what I’m used to, but appropriate for a vehicle/setting like this.
Also sounds like the Cyclops AI has acquired a deeper, more accented voice.
So what are you supposed to do while you are under heavy attack? So things catch on fire, and you run to put the fires out. Mean while the creatures keep attacking and doing more damage. It seems like a death spiral.
My assumption is that heavy attack is something that can be mitigated by moving into a different area. IIRC, last time I ventured down to where that dude in the video seemed to be, Cyclops-hostile critters were clustered in specific areas that you could fairly easily exit when things got too hot, so to speak. I’m trusting that they’ll balance it well, as they seem to do a lot of play-testing and have good judgement.
But like I said, I don’t have the new Cyclops yet…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKCh2Jhmn80
Some story being revealed? D:
https://unknownworlds.com/subnautica/voice-of-the-deep/
We shall find out in 13 minutes!