APE Tech November Round-up

Each month, I'm going to try and do a monthly round-up of the progress I've made with APE Tech, mostly for my own benefit, so I don't feel like I'd spent the month doing absolutely nothing. So here we go for November.

So my continued march into insanity has meant there are now two versions of the engine while I prepare a demo for revealing the game I'm currently working on (for which time is short!)

Initial Thoughts on Starfield

Originally I'd written up a big fleshed out piece for this, outlining the good and bad. But I'll summarise it a little more, as I don't think writing about it is worth that much effort. I'll put it this way instead.

War in the North Performance Solutions

Recently decided to give The Lord of the Rings War in the North a try, which unfortunately required buying a key off a third-party site for the PC version, as it's no longer available for sale. That said, I'd noticed as soon as I reached the second area, the performance absolutely tanked.

I've got an Intel Arc A770, so I'd wager it's more than likely a driver issue on Intel's side. That said, I found two solutions that seem to fix it.

Solution A (recommended): just use the latest DXVK (x86 binaries) from here. This appeared to fix the issue completely for me, though I can't be entirely sure if any other issues are introduced as I've not yet played through the entire game, but it seems more stable regardless.

Solution B: just turn off shadows. Under video settings, there's a toggle for shadows. You can turn them down to minimum, which will help, but I still saw dips in other areas, so it's probably just a good idea to turn them off altogether.

With that done, you'll hopefully have no issues with the game.

Finally Finished Alan Wake

And uh, yeah, it was alright. Can't really say the way the game ended felt, very rewarding? The narrative was great. The combat was awful.

Generally, it probably could've done with more variation in encounters. It took me a long, long time to finish it, as it felt pretty repetitive to me.

Anyway, that's a quick dump of my thoughts. Slightly shorter post than usual as it was spread over such a period of time that I can't even recall everything that happened.