Option to switch to a more cheap sky in serbule and serbule hills

[SkyOak]

Hi! I have a medium-end laptop with an i5 1.60ghz proc and an Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 graphic card. The game is becoming unplayable for me as when I go to serbule my game can crash or completely freeze my laptop. I have played for a month or so and it's been like that since the beginning, even with all the optimizations and graphics set on bad I can't achieve more than 20 fps in these two areas, with random freezes of several minutes sometimes, it can be pretty infuriating. I also can't log in serbule, the game takes at least 15 minutes to de-freeze and it's always a gamble where I have to try to get my char to look at the ground so that the map refreshes.

I read in the blogpost of May 2018 that Serbule and Serbule hills are place where there are experiments with the sky and that in other areas the sky is pretty basic and cheap. It would be a real life saver for me if I could play with cheap skies in these areas. The game is perfectly playable in the other areas but for now I have most of maxed vendors and storages in serbule.

Thank you!
Oak

[alleryn]

I don't know anything about the sky / blog post you are referring to (do you have a link handy?).

Have you tried other options? I vaguely recall logging in during the stress tests for poetry jams in Serbule, and there were some tricks like turning off grass, lowering draw distance that really seemed to help. I can't recall all the details, but i may be able to dig this information up (or maybe someone else has a clearer memory) if these techniques aren't among those you've tried.

[SkyOak]

here is the link! https://forum.projectgorgon.com/entry.php?31-Dev-Blog-May-2018

The interesting part :
"Sky: The sky may just look like a sky, but it's actually a dynamic weather system. With the flip of a switch we can activate rain, snow, sleet, lightning, fog, high winds, and more! But those features reduce performance, even when they're disabled. (And of course they have a bigger impact on performance when they're enabled, which is why they aren't.) The sky is based on a conglomeration of some 3rd-party Unity sky libraries that just haven't proven to be efficient enough. I've been making optimizations to them, but ultimately I suspect we'll need to replace the whole thing with a different system. (This sky system is also used in Serbule Hills, and is some of the reason for FPS slowness there. Other areas use an older sky system that's very cheap but very primitive.)"

Yeah I already turned off everything and lowered the animation distance to the minimum acceptable, I even have the experimental optimization for serbule in the special settings. That's why I was suggesting an option to have just the cheap skies and nothing of the "conglomeration of some 3rd-party Unity sky libraries" that affect performances even when they are disabled.

[Figger1]

Maybe try this link to lower some settings.... https://forum.projectgorgon.com/showthread.php?1338-Graphical-tweaks-to-help-improve-gameplay

In beginning I was on 0:Bad setting, later I tried Good or higher but I didnt like the grass growing with each step I took, it can be changed so the grass is always gone. So now I use Good setting with no grass and distance drawn is less and other settings lowered. I think your problem is that you dont have a dedicated video card with at least 2 GB memory.