It is the first chapter. Games are hard to make, and I am putting my focus into a different one at the moment. I do plan on coming back to this to do more chapters though!
You can only see one comment here because only one other person commented as far as I know. It does not seem to be a bug of itch.io.
Out of curiosity, what are your system specs again? Not that it's an issue with your system's power, but still might help me find a pattern.
Also, could you check if your GPU power mode is set to Auto / Adaptive or Max Performance? Trying to test theories but I also don't have any machines available to me that are having these issues (once again, none of my testers are having these problems).
Most of them were Intel machines with NVIDIAs, BUT most machines are Intel machines with NVIDIAs so that doesn't really mean much, especially since there were at least 1 or 2 reported Ryzens and Radeons.
Porting is going well though. I've been sharing some progress with that on Twitter. It'll be better to have the majority of the game in C++ anyway.
Largely, yes. It is an actual map with a skybox, but the models you see in the title screen aren't actually Actor entities.
I'm actually doing a port of the Actor class into C++. The only best guess I have left is that GDScript (Godot's built-in scripting language) just can't pull off the number of physics requests that I'm asking of it no matter how much I try to optimize it.
It's just very weird how dramatically inconsistent it is across higher end PCs, but GDNative/C++ is significantly faster than GDScript so there should be improvements no matter what.
I don't have an ETA on the C++ update currently. Many apologies. Just trying to do this right.
Yeah, the feedback is largely scattered between here, the Steam hub, Twitter, and several Discord servers. It's a little tough tracking it all down by myself.
I don't think there's anything you can do to help unfortunately, but I do appreciate the offer. It's just going to have to be a back-to-the-basics try-stuff-and-see-what-sticks approach unfortunately.
And as for your Outer Wilds ill comparison guess, you're essentially right. In TCFDX all enemies, gibs, and some projectile weapons have gravity transformations applied to them, so it's a bit more intense in that respect than Outer Wilds. But I did some more digging and experimentation and a possible cause might be a specific enemy type performing a sight check, along with the gib movement calculations. I've made some changes around those to try to make them more "theoretically" performant, but I can't tell if the performance boost is a placebo effect due to me not really having the issues others are having. After some internal testing I'll push the update and we'll all cross our fingers.
It is weird. And since you read the Steam comment and my comment here, you'll know that it's not happening on most modern systems, which is what makes tackling it difficult, especially since it could both be an optimization issue and a user created issue at the same time.
Outer Wilds doesn't do the same things that TCFDX does, so it's not really a good comparison. I'm not sure that there really is a good comparison, other than maybe Aliens vs Predator, but even that's difficult to compare to since every actor in TCFDX is performing gravity transforms. I do have a few guesses as to potential CPU bottlenecks.
On your side note: In my experience working customer service and tech support for a decade, people typically only provide feedback when they're having problems, and most people refuse to believe they are at fault in some way (whether it be missing updates or contracting malware or bad system configurations or faulty hardware, etc...). It's when people aren't having problems that they typically don't leave feedback.
I know there are optimizations still to be made that I'm actively working at, but some of the issues reported by a very small percentage of the player base are difficult to tackle because no pattern has actually emerged with their performance issues and bugs and I don't have quite enough information, so it's basically one dev fumbling around in the dark trying to solve issues that are unlikely to be the problems the game actually has.
But, like I said, I'm trying to fix the problems I know it does have and hopefully it'll solve some issues for some people.
You can never be 100% sure of anything so I'm not going to count out the demo potentially having issues, but between the 75 downloads here and 1400+ as of yesterday on Steam with only 10+- reported performance issues total, I'm more inclined to believe they're likely issues on the users' ends rather than the demo's. Of the performance complaints I've received, one came from a user running Windows 7, while several came from users attempting to run it on Linux via Wine. I hope knowing this you can understand my perspective when attempting to help troubleshoot. That said, despite what the graphics may lead you to believe the game is going to be more CPU intensive than you might expect.
We've tested it on a wide variety of machines, with only one experiencing framerate issues that ended up being an issue with the PC's updates and fixed by a quick restart. Try a restart. You may also want to check your drivers and updates.
