Hello everyone!

This FOUNDRY Friday is going to be a little shorter than usual because our fully remote team is traveling to meet up in person. For some it is the first time they will meet the team in person!

Amongst many other things we’ve been working on, we’ve also been continuing to work on optimizations. Optimizations are such an important part of a game like ours because the entire fun of the game centers around building giant never ending factories. They also help the game run on lower power systems, and on higher quality settings. Most factories in Foundry are CPU bound which means that the GPU is idle and available to help.

One of the optimizations we’ve just finished up is to recreate the unity particle systems on the GPU. This frees up the CPU to handle more of the factory simulation. In this video you can see the CPU version of one of the Foundry smoke effects on the left, and on the right you can see the GPU version. The GPU version costs no CPU to simulate and it also now supports occlusion culling so if it’s completely obscured by terrain or a wall, it costs no CPU or GPU at all:

https://youtu.be/Uwxc59R_WoA?si=jG7V37wvvXxo4a_B 

This plus some other physics/effect/batching optimizations that we’ve been working on makes it so that on average, in dense areas of your factory, you will see on average somewhere between a 50% to 150% increase in your FPS. Here’s a before and after video of a factory designed by Zytukin where the framerate in one of the problematic areas is almost double what it used to be.

Before:

https://youtu.be/vhIda9ZywUg?si=z6sfG3PFJMGzh6J5 

After:

https://youtu.be/_su2rdDMkkw?si=W4-47Bq8-fDBfqLT 

This was just a brief overview into one of the optimizations we’re doing. There’s still a lot more to come which we will cover in a future Foundry Friday.

Until next time,

Thanks for listening!

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