This is just an update on the development. I want to write something every other Sunday/Monday. Almost missed that. As this post was initially meant to be about a few cutscenes, smoke and mirrors of gamedev but because of a pile of bugs I encountered in the last few days  I kept postponing it. I wanted to upload a preview build on Saturday and it is Monday evening and I have still a few serious bugs to fix.

Back to what's happening.

I finished a chapter. And renumbered the chapters again. Internally there are 6 chapters complete but two are combined and called "prelude". Another two are bound into one chapter (I changed "interlude" into a separate chapter and then incorporated it into the actual chapter). The plan here is to have chapter with gameplay with a finale or a cutscene at the end. And maybe a few along the way.

I had to rearrange lot of stuff for the following chapters. This is to make sure I will finish the game in the given time. Some chapters will be missing but I want to add them post release. To counter less content for the main story, I plan to introduce "extended play/endless" mode right away with the release. The mode is going to be sort of a continuation of the story but will be much less linear in both story and gameplay.

I was playing around with the look of the game and for a brief moment removed voxels completely but it didn't feel right. The voxely, squary look is going to remain in the game. The problem is that shaders are now quite bloated with lots of features to give the game a distinct look. And at times I tend to add small things instead of simplifying. There are dozens of very simple calculations (adding, multiplying) but because of the sheer number, it may hog GPU. Recently I did a few changes though:

1. Decided to try smooth lights on Quest instead of what they were - sharply ending. Using another square root is not something I'd like to have so I will be looking for something much simpler. I want to use much more lights in the game. I started to plant them on various objects (energy balls) and in various places (right now there's one elevator).
2. Added another fog calculation (and removed unused bits that really didn't matter for the shader). Right now the fog uses background colour and I am thinking about rendering lowres background to use it instead of calculating fog for each pixel. I will be doing some simple tests to first check if that works fine. Anyway, then there are another few calculations to decide how much of the fog to use. And for objects above certain altitude (or relative angle) it is different. These objects are above fog and should be visible from a great distance. As well as for below certain altitude. These sink in the deep fog below. Anything between should be visible only from a short distance. I required it to be able to go from a high altitude into the fog below. As well as for objects that do the same. I am tempted to have a completely different separate specialised shaders and switch between if that proves to be faster.

And there are more things to be optimised. Like loading times. For these I plan to actually add precompiled shaders as for standalone headsets we're dealing with the same hardware, so it should be ok.

There are also lots of smaller bugs that I have on my list and I want to fix them for good as it may prevent similar bugs from happening in the future.

This week was meant to be a week of adding new EXMs, weapon nodes and enemies but I plan to fix as much as possible + investigate the performance - that has been hit seriously during last 6 months. I need to carefully investigate what is actually making the whole thing slower. While CPU is quite straightforward thing - I just need to catch the hitch frames and see what exactly is slow there, the actual problem are hitches on GPU. It's not that it just works slower and all frames are rendered much slower. It's just odd frames here and then. And what's even worse, the same thing happens on PC. It's just less apparent. And - even then - GPU use is very low and then out of nowhere it just hogs it or skips frames. I suspect that I did something wrong with OpenXR implementation as all of that was less of an issue before. I will be testing it with VRAPI to make sure it is the cause, though.

And there are more outstanding issues I want to resolve now. Like world creation. There are too many 8- and S- figures. I'd like to address that by moving doors between cells around, adding priorities to room generators and generating other rooms between these with higher priority.

There's a lot of work to do. Both technical and content related. And I'd like to do all of that right away as I have so many ideas of what to try and add to the game! Yet again I changed the final boss battle. I always try to add something unique but also use existing stuff as much as possible. All of that to make things exciting and different form each other.

Try preview builds, give feedback - if you're affraid to be to critical because you don't like something, do it, if you prefer e-mail or DM, do so, I am good with harsh words - I mean, the game is for you (unless you completely do not like explorer/shooter games).