Sunlight

The latest Awesomenauts patch increased the framerate a lot for players with older videocards, especially during fierce battles. We managed to optimise our special effects without making them look noticeably different. Today I would like to explain how we did that! Before I dive into the details, let me first give some background. In a 2D game like Awesomenauts, most objects are just a square with a texture on it. The texture contains an image, and you only see that image, not the entire square. However, the videocard renders the entire square. So from a performance perspective, it doesn't matter how much of the texture is actually visible . The entire square is rendered and the every pixel uses performance! Our artists know this, so they try to crop the image to have as few transparent pixels as possible (without changing the actual looks of the end result, of course). Since objects in Awesomenauts contain so many (partially) transparent pixels, we cannot easily detect whether an...

Last week I started the top 7 of my favourite bugs with the numbers 7 to 4. The top 3 is where it gets really crazy. Sit back and enjoy to see how amazingly stupid game development can sometimes be! Click here for numbers 7 to 4 3. Hidden functionality to turn off bugs On one of the platforms Awesomenauts launched on, we had a lot of trouble getting the internet connection between players to remain stable. After a while the ping would always start slowly increasing, until in the end it got too high and the game disconnected. Sometimes this took a couple of minutes to start, sometimes half an hour, but in the end this always happened. We contacted the support team for the platform-specific networking library that we were using, and their answer was that we used too much bandwidth and sent too many packages. So we spent a lot of time optimising, and we managed to half the number of packages and half the bandwidth. However, the problem remained, and they again told us we used too much ba...