Playtest 2 Feedback

[CLimeburner]

A note up front: Something about the terrain is too taxing for my computer (2020 13" Macbook Pro) to handle. If I turn off the Terrain Spawner script, it runs fine, albeit without a ground or objectives, but something about either the terrain generator or rendering the terrain itself drops my computer's performance below 10fps. As such, I won't be able to fully answer some of the questions below.

1) I can't really speak to the controls because I experienced the above mentioned frame dropping and horrible lag. 2) A form of resource management could be cool, although it was unclear to me what the ultimate objective was. I figured out I need to go to the blue dots on the map to conduct the tasks but it's unclear if those serve any purpose beyond the number incrementing. Resource management could be interesting in a context where the three separate tasks had more individual identity and if there was a further macro-goal. 3) Honestly the first thing I thought of when seeing the aesthetic was Carpenter's The Thing. Consequently, I can easily see some sort of interpersonal narrative suiting the game. Honestly, I could also see a larger but minimal narrative built with environmental storytelling making sense. Or even just one-off vignettes to add visual interest to the landscape (abandoned tents, frozen tall mast ships, etc). 4) Related to my above comment, I do think the notion of a more interpersonal narrative makes sense for the game's context. I can't really pass judgement on the advisability of a dating sim because I'm personally not particularly interested or well-versed in the genre. Similarly to my comment regarding uncertain of the macro-goal of the game, I'd probably also have to consider a dating sim in the specific context of whatever the game's task mechanics turn into. 5) Something synth-y might be fun, although I don't know if music is strictly necessary. I do think it needs more than just the engine rumbling, but maybe the muffled howl of Antarctic wind would be enough?

[Owmacohe]

To hear about the lag issue is extremely strange. The game runs at 180+ FPS on my end. However, Mac might present its own set of issues. If you wanted to, you could try changing the "Snowtracks" material on the Terrain prefab in the "Resources" folder to the Default Material, and see if that helps. It'll present errors, but it'll run. I'm going to try running the game on my own Mac laptop and see how it fares

[CLimeburner]

Excellent, i'll try it without the Snowtracks material and report back. I will say, when I turned off the terrain script entirely it still only ran at around 100fps on my end, so it might just be a question of a weaker computer.

[Owmacohe]

100 should be more than fine to not experience any lag

[Owmacohe]

I just downloaded and ran the project on my Mid-2015 MacBook Pro, and while some parts didn't function (lighting and shaders were a bit off), I was able to play it at around 30 fps, with little to no lag. So this may be more than just a Mac vs. PC issue. Make sure you don't have too many taxing applications open when you run it (other Unity projects, high number of browser tabs, etc.). A restart might also help to smooth things over on your end.

[CLimeburner]

Alright, I tried stripping back the Terrain prefab to basically just a collidable plane and that didn't help by itself. Similarly, neither quitting everything I had running, nor restarting helped. Messing around with selectively commenting out code, the issue seems to be specifically with lines 103-105 of TerrainSpawner.cs, likely the Instantiate() method, but I'm not familiar enough with what the code is doing to trace the issue further than that.

[Owmacohe]

It's probably the method I have for loading collidable rocks into the scene. Many terrains are loaded, all of which generate a bunch of rocks. So if one part of the process is slow, the whole thing is slow. However, this really shouldn't be happening, at least not to the scale you're describing. Thanks for your feedback, and hopefully others won't have the same problem!