Updating the SCU demo (soon), cleaning up the task list, and planning the future

Self-Checkout Unlimmited

Last week, we tried to figure out how to optimize SCU so that it doesn’t demand more resources (the screaming and burning GPU) than AAA games with much more complex-looking environments. While these optimizations seemed to improve performance when we tested…testers reported even worse performance :(. So we were only able to push out a small update addressing minor issues like limiting the framerate (so that your GPU is not maxing out on the lowest visual quality setting). After that update though, we’re pretty much done with immediate adjustments. With the full game essentially finalized, we need to update the demo!

Unfortunately, creating the demo was not as simple as just cutting out the demo portion of the game and packaging it up. Using that method resulted in the file size being the same (actually a little bigger?) as the final game (~7GB) … We had to create a new project and migrate the assets used in the demo…and then because Unreal decided to copy over 90% of the assets, go back and delete them.

One would think that deleting files is an easy, even enjoyable process. It was the opposite. Earlier in the development cycle, we discovered that deleting files in the file browser could corrupt Unreal/the project, requiring us to redownload the entire project folder (many gigabytes) and Unreal (many many gigabytes, ~27?). This time, we wanted to be careful and delete files solely through the editor! Except, apparently that is even worse, as 95% of the time, the engine will decide that it rather freeze and crash instead of delete a single file (deleting multiple files at a time was almost a guaranteed crash while there was small success with deleting a single file at a time). In the end, we ended up deleting the files through the standard file browser, and UE did not complain about any corruption *wipes sweat*.

Aside from this file deletion quirk, we’re writing up a post of Tricks (and maybe Tips, but they are probably highly inefficient) and Quirks of UE and 3D game dev. SCU was an incredibly practical (and sometimes fairly painful) crash course, and hopefully someone (at minimum, our future selves) will benefit from having this writeup.

Admin, cleaning, dusting

A lot of items on our task list suffer from parental neglect (us) but are inundated with “friends” (enemies, new tasks get attention first). Post-SCU, we are determined to clean up at least some of them though, such as renaming some GUI files (why is the YDD GUI split into typewriter.psd, mm.psd, and pref.psd? Which bits of which files are the correct up-to-date ones?) and cleaning some git repos (we really should not be pushing giant 800MB binaries to git, but we didn’t know better…see future SCU writeup). Hopefully it won’t take too long! We aren’t looking forward to starting the project but know it will be a huge shadow banished once commpleted.

Back to VNs

Avoiding the issue of those admin tasks (it is too easy to put off cleaning in the digital world), we are back on track with VN work! You’ll get to see more regular updates on Dead Man’s Rest over at the GaG sites and learn about the other project mentioned some time ago.

We’re planning on trying out some dev streams too, so we hope you’ll join and hang out with us then. Going live on streams will be announced on Twitter and Discord!

Questions or Comments?

Feel free to send in any AG-related questions! Our Ask Box is always open.

Q: will you translate Re：H into other language？

A: It would be pretty amazing for RE:H to be translated! That would be quite a daunting project though, so there are no current plans.

Thanks so much for all of your amazing support, and stay safe out there!