How much strain does the weather add on your GPU?

That would be a good time, a good chance to talk about maybe some optimizations that have been done.

So from a VFX standpoint, we had mist on the initial release, which we disabled because that did tank performance quite a bit.

And

you did barely see them.

Yeah.

So it didn't make any sense to keep them.

So when it was heavy rain, we would have some missed planes nearby the player, but that caused a lot of performance loss.

So we disabled it, nobody complained yet, so nobody noticed the difference.

Nobody noticed, yeah.

Except for your GPU, really, really didn't like it.

So that's one of the things.

Other than that, to capture the height data for the rain occlusion, so the rain would not fall through foundations, etc.,

We actually make that data around the player alone.

And it's imagine like 2D sprites.

It's like a really simplified version of the foundation.

It's a plane with a texture on there that we render down.

So that's why it can run relatively unnoticed.

There should not be a massive difference between having rain on and rain off, luckily enough.

That's cool.

Good job.

Thank you.

You guys know the saying where like the best VFX is VFX that you don't even realize is VFX?

That's kind of like a little bit here where it's, you know, you don't even notice the optimizations because everything's just

working.

Smoothly.

I guess there's one piece of optimization like with audio that we did like we reused a lot of the bubble stuff that we talked about in the YouTube video to detect whether you're inside or outside.

So that's we were just reusing stuff and then you get some little points of rain.

So if you're around metal or leaves in the forest, you will hear some drip drops.

And those are like there's maximum three voices or three sounds that can be specialized.

But it's all the same one sound just being repositioned.

It's called multi positioning.

And so you don't use like three different assets.

It's just the same assets being moved around or kept and just panned around.

As a performer.

As a performer, indeed.

So if you're next to factories and a bush, you'll hear both?

You'll hear both, yeah.

What I mean is that let's say you have three bushes around you and they all have some drip drops of vegetation, it won't be three different actual sounds.

It will be the same sound, just panned differently, and you will feel like it's...

It's a common technique in game audio in general to optimize stuff.

Like if you have a game with a bunch of

torches or something and there's like you won't use like a thousand torch sounds you'll use the same sound and just move it around so yeah i can go and notice yeah good job