I’m assembling the threshold gameplay. Placing and tuning enemies I built a while back and only tested briefly — that side turned out to be less rotten than expected. I’m also updating the demo, and while testing the existing environment updates a fair number of issues surfaced. Spent a full day fixing those.
Every now and then I get a comment that, by my judgment, seems low priority. I’m not talking about trolling — I mean comments where, taken at face value, there seems to be nothing to act on. For example, someone commented on the video I posted today that the cables would eat a lot of video memory and I should reconsider decorating that way. The cable mesh uses a single material, so it’s one section, and by vertex count the memory footprint is roughly equivalent to a single 4096 texture. In short, memory isn’t really an issue. And my machine is a 2060 6GB, which isn’t great by current standards — it’s lower-mid tier even as a play environment, let alone a dev environment. Even so, it runs perfectly fine in the editor. When video memory runs short, you can’t get any work done at all.
So on the surface it looked like an unfounded concern, and I almost let it go — but just in case, I went back and looked at those cables again. What the user actually meant wasn’t video memory specifically, but a worry about things slowing down, and instead of just concluding “memory’s fine,” I should have checked once more for anything that could cause a performance hit. So I did, and thanks to that user I found something. Those cables sit flush against the floor, so there’s no need for them to cast real-time shadows. And since the cable bundles are large and heavily self-overlapping, generating that much complex shadow in real time could have been a real cost. Thanks to that comment I was able to fix it. It was already running fine so turning off shadows didn’t produce a dramatic performance jump, but there’s no reason to burn performance on something that isn’t needed.
So now I find myself giving even the strangest comments a second thought. There are people who just show up to pick fights — usually people with no interest in the game, who haven’t played it and have no intention to — and I’m not sure their words warrant a second pass. But most comments, especially the ones that seem unnecessary or come across as rude or unpleasant, seem worth digging into and thinking through once more. I think I wrote something similar during the last project — it feels like finding gold in mud.