Hello everyone!
We are the end of another month and we have more updates to share with you on the game. This month has been a very, very promising month. We will touch on the victories and challenges faced for August and the new updates to the roadmap for the remainder of the year.
PERFORMANCE
This month (August), we had to adjust the schedule a bit regarding the order and prioritizations currently set. As we have a high level of ambition for the fidelity of the game, we have been working on ways to improve the framerates and general performance for the game when played on the highest graphical setting. We are pleased to announce that on low to mid-tier machines, we are able to push the game to extreme limits while maintaining the standard framerates (30)! We will work on sharing those benchmarks with information on the machines that we have tested on, We will do so in hopes of giving you a bit of a preliminary perspective on how your machine might ultimately run the game.
During our most recent stress test, I added over 130 desks with other furnishings on the map including lighting (with optimized shadows, etc), and we were able to maintain our required internal benchmark of 30 FPS. That is quite a few miles that we have come from in times past. In fact, all of these optimizations took place this month.
The reason we shifted our focus, was due to the limitations we faced prior when testing new characters and animations along with other systems testing. This also included the build mode system which prompted us to shift the focus. Once we get to the remaining build mode optimizations, we will want to have almost all performance bottlenecks and limitations resolved.
To place this all in perspective, the latest optimizations are before we have finalized all of our performance optimizations planned. This brings a great deal of optimism and confidence that we will have very good performance for the final game at release.
SCHEDULE CHANGES
As a result of the above shift in focus of the month of August, we have moved most of what is currently on the roadmap for August (as of the date of this blog) to October, and most of Octobers tasks have been addressed this month. For reassurance, this does NOT change our anticipated release date in any regard. This is just a shift in monthly priorities. From a macro perspective, we simply swapped October and August.
We will make more official updates to the roadmap sometime in September to reflect what we have completed and what remains to be done in October. We will also decide if we will need to reshuffle September as a part of this re-organization of the remaining schedule. We will keep you updated.
Thanks for sticking in there as we charge toward the release date! Stay tuned for the end of September as we will share the next update then.
Thanks!