it seems here optimisation is a term broader than Iwould wish; suspension of disbelief - is how most games render indoor environments. windows generally don’t look outside (our out at limited area of lesser complexity). Mostly games just opaque the window and, at most, carry on the sounds that the outdoor environment had (now under a muffling filter).
With Skyrim, I wouldn’t play the game without a tonne more soundbank mods (eg sounds of skyrim).
Iliked walking into dungeons and still having the storm carry on outside… or hearing people sleep in their beds at night (loud sleepers).
Where KCDgoes to overkill in buildings is in, as Ancient mentioned, the lack of culling. NOTculling outside triangles from the draw load. Sure- we don’t see them- but our CPU/GPU is still entertaining them…
The real framerate kill was the lighting (Ultra), and to be fair (playing on colour accurate, and calibrated, screens)- this is the best lighting Ihave ever seen a game use (light scattering like this used to be the realm of benchmark suits around the time of the ge force fx5X00 series… (early noughties)).
I think we need users with less than six cores plus hyper threading to back off on a few settings or else the CPUWILLbecome the bottleneck and their GPUs wont hit 100%.
Ihave always found ways to use 100% of my GPU.
If Ihad a 1080GTX @ 60% usage I would find the bottleneck and remove it.
And yes, between the game settings and the video cards drivers control panel this would be very doable.
Presently the game does have a few buildings with what Ibelieve to be ‘double sided triangles’ making up their innards…
(eg first store in Skalitz is an obvious one…)
What generally happens when asset creation get given creation tools is a learning curve.
Im my experience - teams should throw away any assets made in the first two three days as they often have issues (like not using the tools correctly and leaving triangles double sided as an easy example).
In the whole of Skalitz the only framerate bomb Iget is the store. When the game first launched I could expect 30fps with everything set to Ultra… somewhere around patch 1.2-1.3.x the game changed a few things; but NEVER has that store in Skalitz been touched upon (which Ifind incredulous as THATshould never have launched).
There are a few points around the game like that first store in Skalitz… they drop even the best rigs to half framerates…(and only around these spots).
It is pretty obvious where the issue is, and if a supervisor on the team had the time to check; these things would be fixed in a few hours.
All the trouble spots across the map (if they have been identified) could be fixed in a day.
Until that last patch that wasn’t their goal… they were literally tying to make people games work/work reliably.
worrying about a few HAVES not getting Ultra 60fps is a much later care when your games main quest is unreliable to complete.
What I see when I look at the project; the last month or so would have been a rush job direction change- pull out anything that doesn’t work well.
Unfortunately pulling stuff out (small or large) often leads to issues elsewhere.
Forum goers are happy stating that the game is now how they might have wanted to launch it… but if they hadn’t had to lose so much time to tweaking a product for a short goal lauch, and then lost twice as much time dealing with that… we would all be better off.
Except- people like me- who have had a near perfect experience with the game, can run Ultra+ settings on aged equipment, and love what they have… I have enjoyed from day one.
So Iam one of the few who can justify them launching when they did.
Of course my experience isnt what filled these forums on launch.
It is hard for me to speculate if broken games were the minority or majority.
Represented at a help desk level; happy patients dont register their health/happiness.
What we have seen is that these forums have gone comparitively silent since 1.4.3 patch.
It is safe to say by 1.4.3 patch, the game has become usable.
1.5 optimisations I hope to include a review of some building models etc to alleviate the silly framerate drops that even top end systems experience.
With regard to indoors not being ‘optimised’; most game interiors either use a load zone to drop the outside world rendering and load up extremely high quality assets. This is a software trick developers have always needed to use. KCD blows me away as I dont have to run mods like ‘open cities’ to make it more open world. Even with ‘open cities’ running- shops are still instanced affairs usually without portals to view outside. KCDs method is superior from a technical level by a large magnitude.
I agree that the first tavern in the witcher 3 looks pretty- but it is hardly fqir to compare it to the complex lighting model and true open world that Kingdom Come musters.
The coolest thing is that consoles can even attempt this. Oh how far we have come! More players on more platforms is more watercooler talk from happy gamers.
And KCD will still be impressive a few years from now. It does attempt to set the bar high.
With a few warm ups/attempts- it will set some records.
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