Final Push

After the team took a well-deserved break over Christmas, it was time to start back on the project, and Holly had drawn up a diagram detailing all the tasks she was going to finish before the deadline. We saw this and instantly hopped on board as it was a fantastic idea to help visualise what still needed to be done before the deadline.

This final week, the biggest issue was the fresh new bugs we encountered due to our game not being optimised enough to run on the Oculus headset.

Optimisation Issues

It worked amazingly when the game was running in the viewport, but I think this was due to it running on the desktop and not the headset. However, on Thursday, we built multiple copies of the game to the headset through the unreal editor 'Lunch' button, but on the day of submission, when we would lunch to the headset through the same button, the system would completely crash.

if we take a look at the changes made in the project settings (these are only the changes made this final week and not including the other times we have optimised the settings);

Project - Package

• Cook only maps < True >

• List of maps to include in a packaged build < all according maps listed >

Engine - Rendering

• Maximum number of CSM cascades to render < 2 >

• Mobile MSAA < 4x MSAA >

• Reflection Captures Resoloution < 64 >

• Forward Shading < True >

• Vertex Foggiung for Opaque < True >

• Bloom < False >

• Instance Stereo < False > - should be set to true but doesn't render Niagra in VR if it is

• Mobile HDR < False>

• Mobile Multi-View < True > - set to false if using android Vulkan rendering level or unreal will crash 24/7

Plug-Ins - Oculus VR

• FFR Level < FFR Low >

Doing this did make the game run better when it was built onto the headset through the lunch button. Still, once you would package it as an apk and load it onto the oculus developer app and lunch it from there, the headset would either crash straight away or shortly after the second level was streamed in and the first level was unloaded.

The thing was halfway through development; I had set up a smooth load system in the persistent level that would show a loading screen and only removed it when the next level to load had finished loading. Then once the camera fades back out, it would unload the previous level. In the viewport, this worked fine, and in build but on some package builds, it would crash, but in others, it would work in.

However, what we realised the day of submission is that all the assets people have been making have been using a texture file that had been imported in at 2048 x 2048, so I then went through and set the max in-game for the gloves to be 1024 x 1024 and then every other texture was set too 512 x 512. This still didn't work as I could only do it for most of the base textures and not any of the sub textures as we were running out of time due to finding this out late in development.

Reflecting on the team

I have to say I am extremely pleased with every one of my member's works and the contributions they have brought to the team. It was a pleasure to work alongside one another. We had excellent communication within the group, and no one had any conflict with one another, which allowed us to push out a game I was never expecting to produce. I would say that as a team, we found ourselves increasing our scope further and further as development went on. Even on the last week of development, we were still adding new features for the game, which led to some unnecessary work and stress.

If you have played the project, you will notice we were nowhere close to fixing all the bugs; if we are being honest, there might be more bugs than actual gameplay, but when you can have any playthrough, the game has turned out ten times better than any of us could have ever imagined.

For myself, I could have worked faster on mechanics such as the crystals as at points getting the concept that would fit without game became challenging after five iterations which affected development time for others on the team because of issues I was having on my end, but it did finial get sorted. Overall I am happy with what I have abolished and what the team has polished and cant wait to see what the project brings for us all.