Hello everyone,

Recently, we have published posts about several bigger and smaller features and other goodies, such as the Glossary, improvements, new Skills, and so on. There is, however, something else we have been spending a lot of time on, and probably most of our players won’t even notice the outcome.

It is about the Unity Addressables function. Essentially, it assigns keys to assets (most prominently art assets), acting as a reference ID, enabling us to move art assets out of the so-called Resources folder in Unity. The main purpose of using Addressables is for game assets not to take up memory when they are not being used, only when they are.

This is because the Resources folder is suboptimal and non-preferred for storing assets, significantly hindering the porting of the game to Android and iOS. With the Addressables function, the game will run more smoothly on more low-end PCs and eventually, on smaller devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

In practice, this means that location artwork in settlements and Events or combat backgrounds along with all character assets, including animations, icons, and portraits, have been moved to be treated as addressables. The game uses the aforementioned assets, especially character portraits and icons, in various places, so we had to do a lot of restructuring in order for it to handle them easily and for the whole thing to be more practicable.

We have been working on this for almost two months along with other tasks and we dare say we are more than content with the outcome. This way, we managed to reduce the initial loading time, the game’s memory usage, and the installed game itself is now 3.8 GBs instead of the 4.6 GBs it used to be.

We are definitely planning to pursue further optimization not only in this direction but also to achieve a more enjoyable gameplay experience on smaller displays. Furthermore, we are going to explore the possibility to add controller support benefiting devices such as Steam Deck – or eventually other consoles as well.

We hope you don’t mind some more techy posts such as this one every once in a while.

Stay tuned and conquer the wasteland!

-The Lost Pilgrims

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