A few days late, but the November update is here! This month, I took a break from fleshing out the world artistically and scratched a dev/tooling itch.

I mentioned in the last patch release that the need for optimization looms large — a friend gave the current build a whirl on his Steam Deck (which is intended to be the eventual minspec hardware for the final game) and was getting an eye-watering-but-not-in-a-great-way 8 fps. No surprise, as I’m only getting ~30fps on my 3070ti development machine, but it further underscored the need for an efficiency pass -- all things in due time.

What got done?

Every new task on this project is, in some way, a learning experience for me, so while the next few months are intended to be focused more on developing actual gameplay concepts/mechanics, I took November to start exploring Unreal’s profiling toolsets, and set up an in-game performance stats overlay so users can better report their experiences and findings. As of v0.2.0, you can access that overlay by pressing F12 during gameplay --

-- related: if anyone knows a good way to access GPU utilization data via blueprints, let me know!

What got pushed off?

I want to to find and develop an easy way for players of dev builds to send performance profiling data back to me so I can get a deeper view into the experience users are having on various hardware combinations. That had been part of the goal for November, but the last half of the month wound up being occupied by moving my family and I into a new home! We’re starting to get settled in and my new home office no longer looks like this —

— so I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things and building out a December release.

What’s next?

For the next few months, I’ll be working on developing systems to support the game’s actual play mechanics. Navigating the game's eventual storyline will depend on the character making use of an “AR overlay” system, so the target for December is to get a proof-of-concept version of a navigation guidance system up and running.

On top of that, some studio housekeeping — I’ve been storing the project repository for this game (and all my dev projects) in a Phabricator setup on my home server, but Phabricator stopped being supported earlier this year and many of the libraries on my Linux box are starting to move on with life and leave it in the dust. I’ve been trying to just live with it, but a recent move to openssl 3.0 on my system that I am loathe to roll back has proven to be the final nail in the coffin, and I can’t push/pull to the server anymore, which means my backup scheme is kaput and I already don't sleep great at night.

After some research, my rough plan is to a) move from Phabricator to Gitea for project hosting, b) set it up in a Docker container to better control the kind of package dependency issues that ultimately caused the demise of my Phabricator setup, and c) pray the whole process doesn’t monopolize all my dev time this month.

By coincidence, the Blender development team appears to have also landed on Gitea as their Phabricator alternative, and while they are a much larger outfit with much larger, more complex needs/considerations, their blog posts (one, two) on the topic have been a helpful reference for thinking through what it’s going to take to (re-)set up shop.

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season. More to come soon!

-Tyler