Hi everyone!

We just released the third major update for Arcadia Fallen!

While developing the sequel, we have expanded on the code and systems used for the first game. To bring Arcadia Fallen into the future and make it more on par with its sequel, we have maintained the original game and released a new version with numerous improvements to the visuals, controls, and performance!

A custom mipmap implementation that was developed for Arcadia Fallen II has been added to Arcadia Fallen.

Shaders usually perform a nearest-neighbor anti-aliasing algorithm, which means that when multiple pixels in an image take up a single screen pixel, it will only consider the nearest 4 pixels in the grid. Say, when a source image of 1000x1000 pixels has a screen area of 100x100 pixels, for every displayed pixel, there is 10x10 or 100 pixels worth of information, where only the nearest 2x2 pixels will be considered, and this leads to a significant loss of data and artifacts like jagged edges and broken lines that become more severe the further the two sizes are apart. This is called downsampling. Likewise, when a source image is smaller than the screen area, the pixel values are interpolated, which leads to the image becoming blurry. This is called upsampling.

Mipmaps are pre-rendered downsampled images of any texture in steps of halves, which have been created considering all information in the source image, instead of just the nearest 4 pixels. If your source image is 512x512 pixels, it will have mipmaps of 256x256, 128x128, 64x64, etc.

The custom system we created picks a mipmap of the exact size of the screen area or larger (to prevent upsampling), but no larger than twice the size of the screen area (to prevent downsampling). This means that for the 100x100 screen area in the example above, the game would use a mipmap of 128x128 instead of the source image, and for a larger screen with a screen area above that, it would use a source image of 256x256, and so on.

As a result, the system ensures the game looks its best on all devices and screens, while still being highly performant.

Our mipmap system also has a custom implementation for mipmaps streaming designed for 2D games. Standard mipmap streaming is designed for 3D games, where textures for objects far in the distance have some of their mipmaps stripped to reduce GPU memory usage, since there is no reason to have a 4K texture loaded to the GPU for an object that only takes up a small amount of the screen area. By stripping unnecessary mipmap levels for objects in the distance, the game can drastically reduce GPU memory usage while still supporting high-quality textures for objects that are rendered closer to the screen. Mipmap streaming can also drastically improve load times, since unused mipmaps won't be loaded at all. Using these concepts, we have created a custom implementation of mipmap streaming designed for 2D games with adaptive 4K support.

When a screen is too small or the GPU doesn't have enough memory to support 4K, the game won't load 4K textures.

Hidden characters and other inactive objects will have their largest mipmap level stripped, effectively reducing their GPU memory usage by 66% when they aren't visible.

We have also improved preloading of character textures, so textures for poses/expressions that aren't used in a scene are no longer loaded, which has drastically reduced the amount of GPU memory used in most scenes.

Despite adding mipmaps and improving 4K support, which has increased the size of most texture assets by 60~300%, the game often uses 10~30% of the GPU memory it did before!

• Alert prompts can now be canceled by clicking outside the pop-up frame.

• Improved peripherals support.

• Improved touch support.

• Improved software keyboard support.

• Numerous minor improvements to controls and UI audio feedback.

• Fixed an issue with keybindings not being reloaded properly after discarding changes.

• Improved 4K support for numerous assets.

• Improved the rendering quality of held ingredients when placing ingredients during the alchemy minigame.

• Improved texture quality for numerous assets.

• Crunch compression has been disabled to reduce the amount of overall artifacts from lossy compression.

• Fixed numerous non-power-of-two (NPOT) textures, which used more GPU memory than necessary.

• The credits scene now reuses in-game graphics instead of playing a video.

• Optimized video files.

• Improved preloading of numerous assets for fast loading times and reduced CPU usage. 

• Improved memory handling of numerous assets for reduced memory usage.

• Improved shader variant stripping, removing more than 50 unnecessary shader variants for reduced GPU memory usage.

• Optimized numerous shaders for improved GPU performance.

• Upgraded the scene light system.

• Upgraded Unity version by more than 3 years of updates and improvements to the game engine.

• Slightly improved how letters fade in for spoken text.

• Slightly improved the bobbing animation for the line indicator arrow.

• 'Hofland' is now consistently spelled with one 'f'.

• Fixed some typos and other text errors.

• Made async operations more robust.

• Optimized numerous scripts and operations.

We have noticed many players are replaying or playing the original game for the first time following the release of the sequel, and we're happy that we can now make the first game an even better experience for players with big and small devices! 🧡

Cheers,

The Galdra Team