Attention Officers,
Welcome to the 84th edition of our Ready or Not Development briefing, March 28th, 2025!
Today's briefing will cover some of the progress that we’re making in optimization, some details into our AI difficulty system dev process, narrative content pieces, and convention merch.
Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.
Optimization
A whopping 1,200+ assets are being updated in pursuit of our persistent optimization efforts. So far internally we have seen some noticeable gains that prevent CPU bottlenecking, which should allow for higher GPU usage and therefore overall performance.
Stuttering across levels has been reduced by an effort to ‘instance’ assets, meaning that multiple otherwise duplicated assets are being grouped together to be treated as just one asset (e.g. for walls). Many excessively performance-intensive materials are also now optimized, decreasing unnecessary shader complexity in scenes.
Collisions were updated across over a hundred assets to be more performant, including fixing some complex collisions across the game.
We began adding Simplygon to our development pipeline, affecting our characters models and some other assets. By doing so we are decreasing the presence of ‘quad overdraw’ in the game, which is when multiple pixels are computed for rendering even when some of them may be hidden under another, and therefore unnecessarily harming performance.
We fixed an issue with long hair physics in-game that could cause a large frame drop.
SWAT AI underwent a performance pass to help its systems run more smoothly, and we did a shadow pass across base-game levels in order to reduce any shadow-related performance hinderances.
Our animation team sorted out some notable bottlenecks in the character movement systems, and are working on tying in some additional animation fidelity improvements that are being polished behind the scenes.
AI Difficulty System Process
Our game design, engineering, and QA have been hard at work hammering out the new difficulty system across all missions in the game. We are now entering a phase of intensive difficulty playtesting that will focus on three missions: Ides of March, Elephant, and Dorms.
The reason these three levels are selected for intensive playtesting is that they each represent key suspect AI archetypes and scenario types that exist across Ready or Not. By dedicating intensive playtesting efforts on these three missions, we are able to get a solid representative idea of how the global difficulty mode modifiers broadly affect the game as a whole.
Ides of March was selected due to being a barricaded suspects scenario that has a high proportion of skilled professional suspects with usage of traps. Elephant is meanwhile highly dynamic with amateur suspects in an active shooter scenario, including bomb defusal. Finally, Dorms has inexperienced suspects that utilize melee, accompanied with a high proportion of civilians— yet is a more manageable level size compared to a mission like Twisted Nerve.
With a solid understanding of how these global difficulty modifiers function in gameplay for these controlled environments, we can better analyze how they function in other levels and set up the mission-specific difficulty modifiers to be carefully tuned for each mission.
Automated AI Behavior Tests
A new automated test program created by a member of our programming team is accelerating the testing process for AI difficulty system behaviors across all levels. This automated testing procedure artificially speeds up in-game and executes actions that allow over 50 types of AI value modifiers (i.e. hearing range, accuracy, vision) to be tested in a matter of a second, with every level in the game able to be loaded into and tested in a total of just 15 minutes.
Our QA team would otherwise have to manually go around these levels, finding suspects in the level and testing each stimulus value manually, such as by shooting at the suspects or throwing grenades. With this automated process we are able to much more rapidly iterate on and fix AI behavior without requiring additional QA testing time for these tedious aspects of stimulus value testing.
(Video Below: The automated testing program in action, if you blink you’ll miss it. To the right of the viewport are a handful of the checked stimulus values outputting once the test concludes)
[previewyoutube=PkV4ZnDnZY0;full][/previewyoutube]
Narrative Content Pieces
Our marketing and narrative team are creating a few promotional content pieces that will be rolling out in the near future, which will help expand on Ready or Not lore and world building. These sorts of pieces may also include details drawn from behind the scenes narrative building that are not explicitly visible in-game.
If you’re not subscribed to the VOID Interactive YouTube channel already, now’s the time!
Convention Merch
For those of you that will be attending gaming conventions over the next six months or so you could have a chance to snag some exclusive Ready or Not convention merch!
We will not necessarily have a booth nor merch at all these occasions, but if you run into some of us while supplies last there’s a chance you could be given a bag of goods!
Other than that, we’re fleshing out a bunch of new designs and merch items to be offered later on.
Conclusion
As you can see, one of our big focuses for the next content update is quality of life improvements, particularly around optimization. Our updated AI behavior testing process is now fixing a variety of strange quirks that have persisted across suspects and civilians, while helping us create the difficulty system. Lastly, with creative content and conventions on the way there's plenty more to pay attention to on the horizon!
This concludes our 84th development briefing, thank you for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!
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