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Added Feral Sense option (None, Day, Night, All).

I'm still tweaking it, but I expect to be playing with it set to Night and actually being afraid of the dark.

Most of the optimizations have to do with making the game smoother, not higher peak FPS, so less frequent and milder FPS drops.

For example, I can run at 60 FPS, but it would often drop to 30, 20, 15 for multiple frames, which feels bad. Now I rarely drop below 30 and it just feels much smoother. I have yet to try A20 optimizations on lower end computers, so results there many be more, less or the same as a higher end computer.

I tried Vulkan last month on Windows and the Unity editor crashed in Vulkan mode while making a build. I have a ticket open with Unity and they have reproduced the crash. I stopped testing at that point and did not try a normal build and switching it to Vulkan. I will probably try again once Unity fixes the editor crash.

I actually tested DX12 a few weeks back (you just add to the project as a gfx choice), but it caused a crash when the occlusion manager was on. Unity replicated and thinks it was nVidia's drivers, so I retested yesterday with the latest drivers and did not crash, but I do get a DX12 error (x2) on world exit, which I told Unity about. We do want to support it, but FPS seems the same. I still have DX12 enabled in the Unity editor, which also has that error (x2), but they don't seem to break anything other than making the console open.

It is on the back burner. Optimizations basically got bumped to higher priority.

Just plans. We may not do the Unity upgrade for A19, since there is more risk, but many of the optimizations can be moved over without updating Unity.

I've used that slider in my own games. Only regret not putting more choices for values. I'd prefer 5 or 10 % increments for many of our options. Someday.

This is very subjective. I would fully expect some people to hate it, since you can always find someone who hates anything. Looks cool to me, but I have not seen one in person, so can't say 100% that it is great.

Got the baking thread working today and with full baking quality instead of simple/fast. Full was required with how Unity implemented it. Hopefully I won't find any issues in final testing tomorrow and that will get committed.

Recent a19 changes have to do with Twitch.

Map restart should not be required for the optimizations I'm doing. Data formats are not changing.

Many of the a20 optimizations will move to a19 easy enough. I'm even thinking we upgrade a19 to Unity 2020.3, since it was not hard and some optimizations, like mesh baking, need newer Unity versions.

We just finished our project review last week with Unity. Made a few performance changes as we did that. We have tickets open with them on Vulkan and DX12, so might see some stability/crash improvements in that area. Improved our texture atlas tool, since art complained about how slow it was and caused errors using during game play. Now I'm working on collision mesh baking off the main thread, since that was being a pain to frame split from the vis mesh and Unity pointed out they added BakeMesh a while ago (2019.3).

Trees are certainly not done and are on my list of FPS hogs. They

Hopefully not, since it is a good feature to keep.

Punted in this case means not A20. Feral Sense has to do with the level that zombies can see and hear you, not blood moons or pathing. Feral sense at night for instance, would make them find you much easier, so if you go out at night, biome zeds will find you.

I'd give it a 95% a20 will be on U2020 LTS.

I would think not for horde zombies. If you ran into a POI on horde night, then POI zeds would follow sense rules? Be a while before this gets worked on.

We pool a lot of stuff, but you often get spikes anyway. Even changing parent from the pool to another owner can cause spikes.

Instantiating after the first time is typically cheaper, since Unity keeps resources around, so instantiate is often not that bad.

Unity 2020.3 LTS released today and in testing so far has been working great and in general, due to optimizing, the game is running quite well now.

It is not about distance or rendering or scripts. All those GameObjects and their components are expensive to create, which means lag spikes. It need further analysis to find all the slow parts and find solutions for each.

As Blake_ had said, there are many issues with that.

The main overhead is instantiating the entity, not AI or animation. There are ways to speed up spawning and they are not trivial, but it will probably be improved at some point.

Y is about 1m, but it varies depending if up or down. Y is low because I don't want AI spawning in rooms above or below you and dropping your FPS. We may possibly do some type of entity caching before we go gold.

nice!

It is 8m in XZ for them to start spawning. Don't know what you mean by calculated in.

1 How they will work has not been determined. Trigger traps will probably be the same, but at some point stealth may add a chance they don't trigger.

1b Sleepers work how they do for performance reasons. They don't spawn until you are near the sleeper volume. That has not changed in a20, but as the game gets more optimized, some of those rules may be relaxed.

2 Those spikes have no colliders, they are just cosmetic, so removing them won't change collisions,