>>26741402From the VS devs
New engine, performance issues, and promised features pushed back
When I first launched Vampire Survivors, all I wanted was to have a little game that would allow me to have fun making new game content in my spare time. Thanks to your incredible support and a once-in-a-lifetime surge of luck, the game turned out to be an incredible success instead.
Getting help from some friends to try fix all the issues deriving from such a huge player base got very soon unsustainable, so I've also started a parallel project to port VS to an industry-standard game engine with the help of trusted freelancers.
The port to the new engine is going smoothly and the game is already fully playable, lacking mostly in polish and content, but we also ran benchmarks that show a tenfold increase in performance (and so in framerate).
The port going well is the reason why a few features promised back in January haven't been developed on the current version yet, like key-remapping, increase responsiveness when switching screens, localised text that fits the available space etc...
It's just more time effective to implement those things directly in the new engine, and the same goes for worrying about game performance and hardware compatibility.
While there could be a lot of stuff getting drawn on screen in VS, the real bottleneck are the physics calculations that are stuck on using only a single CPU core, which is why not even having powerful modern hardware guarantees a smooth gameplay. That list of hardware includes the Steam Deck unfortunately, with the game's performance dipping to an embarassing slideshow near the end of a run, while other graphics-intensive games run at a buttery 60fps.
The new engine will ensure VS runs like butter too.
We're aiming to release the version on the new engine in the summer. The executable will be completely different, but Savedata will be moved over of course.
