Third Party Speed Reports and Waste Twist

Been an interesting day, starting with some great FPS reports from the field. I sent a build of The Escape demo to some internal team members and the report from one machine shows the V1.0085 version running at 32 fps and the new version running at over 90 fps, so we've definitely made a substantial improvement in performance (for some levels).  

Aside from building versions for internal usage, I have spent most of the day writing a small prototype which allows me to manually adjust the weapon direction of the character at various waste twist angles. It's not as straight forward as rotating the X or Y axis as the spine of the character is angled in such a way that such simple interpolation fails miserably. The curve is not linear too, which meant I needed to write something that allowed me to manually tweak the spine angles for each of the angles the character could twist, both left and right. The engine now has 36 entries based on how much the character twists around to shoot while strafing the target, and then I smooth the transition between the two closest sites.  The result is pretty good with a more human, less robotic twist to the character.  The good news is that writing the waste tweak editor and adding it into the game did not take ALL day, which means I have a few hours left to work on some small artifacts that have creeped in while I was distracted with performance.

My plan is to start the first of my major tasks on Friday, which according to my most current schedule is restoring dynamic shadows to the PRE-BAKE system for things like crates and characters (initially using the new glass terrain geometry to retain the performance we have now).  It will be part of my daily paranoia that each functional item I put back in does not adversely affect our new found performance metrics!  Until Friday...have a nice evening!