Awhile ago I invested another $500 into 33 Gamma L.L.C. - the company responsible for Dixie Ball’s development. This time in addition to funding our server infrastructure and other expenses, my company acquired a video card on the used market that was about 7x more powerful than the one I had been developing with.
I started testing Dixie Ball on this new card and was dismayed to find the frame-rate kept dropping down to 30fps. At first I thought we got a bad card. After much testing, I concluded the card was good. So what could be the problem? Well, it turns out we had an issue with the geyser area nodes interacting with too many objects. So I set the area nodes to only interact on collision layer 3, which is reserved for the player character. That got us a 6x improvement in minimum fps!
I had no idea that a more powerful video card would result in a performance improvement for players. For the longest time I held back on the idea, sticking with my R7 250x because I didn’t want to make a game that wouldn’t run on older hardware. I wanted Dixie Ball to run on an ancient computer, so pretty much anyone could enjoy the game. We even implemented a potato mode to this end.
I hope this performance improvement will help people better enjoy the game. We have some new features that are still under development; hopefully we will be able to implement them soon, and provide folks with an even better experience.
