THIS IS THE TRAILER BUILD SHHHHH

It has been nine days since we last spoke - and I come BEARING GIFTS!

In the previous build, looking in this direction would drop the average framerate from over 100 fps, to roughly 15. We called it the Bad Direction, and feared its presence, while also acknowledging it was a primary location in the airport.

The problem is light, you see. I first started building stores when I knew very little about 3D development. This is my first time building content in Unity with my bare hands, which means the beautiful stores I was so proud of making could each contain up to nine expensive spotlights. We can't 'bake' any of our lighting, because the airports are simulated, and the environment changes every time you open the game. This means all of my very, very expensive lighting setups all had to be calculated in real-time. I then decided to cluster most of our expensive, dynamically generated buildings in a single location - called the 'Cornucopia' in the alien language - before adding an extra wing to that section of the airport to fit yet more stores.

Standing at one end of the airport and looking across the environment, over 200 real-time lights were being rendered.

Every.
Single.
Frame.

You might have noticed that 'trailer build' is written at the top of this post in big honkin' letters. It's because we're making a trailer, and getting a Steam page set up! Stellar stuff happening, that greatly benefits from the updated frame rate featured in this build. After several days of research and investigation, we switched the entire project to deferred rendering. This rendering method makes our current lighting scheme more palatable, and will make the game run even better once I have time to revamp all of our shops to use less lights.

I know things now!

i hope that will not be our destruction.

By the way, if you find the meat store and toilet pub in the linked build, you'll see the beginnings of our LOD system - designed to turn off components based on your distance from a store, and ensure future performance gains are preserved. Let us know what you think of the effect!

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If you encounter any issues with the build, press [Alt+9] to reset the game, [Alt+2] to turn off your reticle for Cool Screenshots, and [Alt+0] to skip to the plane scene.

I continue to recommend that you do not press [Alt+1] repeatedly, while acknowledging that it makes