Meet The Crew!

I thought the day would never arrive when I’d be adding in the contributor NPC’s and implementing all of their interactions! If any of these Level 3 contributors for the Indiegogo campaign are still following this project, well, I finally did it and I hope you’re thrilled to see these screenshots!

Each character has several dialogue interactions with Donovan that should provide a little more insight into what is going on.

As the story goes, this unit was on its way into Grinwood to provide assistance to the GPD, but ended up getting trapped in an area of Hell. What happens after Donovan meets up them will be up to the player to decide.

I ran into a few issues with the HUD as a result of reorganizing the layout, but it’s all fixed and now I think it looks much cleaner than before. I also hit another framerate issue that got progressively worse for some reason:

I hadn’t really added anything new to the level because it was pretty much done, but the framerate started to tank whenever I was testing out the dialogue tree for the NPC’s. Then it dawned on me that it may have been a rendertarget issue!

I remember reading a long time ago that using too many of them was costly. I won’t get technical here, but basically all of the portraits are 3D models being projected in realtime (for a really cool effect) as opposed to a static 2D image file being displayed (like it was in the mod version)

Each NPC has it’s own camera to capture the portrait (totalling 9 in this map) and that is exactly what’s bringing the framerate down. I removed all the rendertargets except for one and the framerate jumped back up:

I had to go back and make a really convoluted system of using only one rendertarget and hiding/unhiding specific models and lights depending on which dialogue window was open. It was a pain to implement, but worth it to keep the framerate running smooth!

If any of the contributors are reading this update, regardless of level, thank you again!!! 🙂