Dement
Dement 0.4.2.1 Hotfix (c)
One of the monetary rewards was bugged, and made loading the saved game break. Have no fear, your saves are safe- this patch will remove the broken item and give you your otherwise lost reward money.
Just to be super safe though, backup saves that don't match the current version number will no longer be overwritten, in case of unforeseen catastrophe with an update.
Thanks for playing!
Dement 0.4.2.1 Hotfix (b)
Capturing some types of enemies was bugged (gas grenades weren't having an effect), it is now fixed.
The enemies at the locations you could buy tips for weren't spawning properly, that has been fixed as well. Additionally, the icon on the map was wrong - it was showing the stat boosting lock box icon, this is now fixed.
To make up for any wasted gas grenades, if you started the fight club quest before this hotfix, your "capture reward" value will increase by 300 coins once, which should cover any lost expenses. ;)
Dement 0.4.2.1 Content Update
- New Feature - Fight Club: In the forest of Quiet Mountain, disenfranchised Praesidium members gather. There, they study and fight monsters (and each other) in hand to hand combat. Purchase gas grenades and capture monsters for them. Defeat the captured monsters in the fighting ring to gain a copy of their research on that monster and some of the money from their betting pool! Capturing monsters yields a monetary reward as well, including duplicates. Capture multiple enemies at once with a single gas grenade to turn a profit!
- New Weapons - Grenades - flash, frag, and gas. Flashes and frags may be purchased from Sgt. Lewis and gas from the Praesidium apostates' fight club.
- QOL - Notes are now sorted into categories.
- QOL - When saving, a copy of the save file will be created before overwriting the old file in case of corruption issues. If the copying fails, the game won't save.
- Buffed Rapacers - they aren't so helpless anymore.
- Buffed Gravespawn (worm-looking enemies) detection range. Also added a component to despawn them if they get far enough away from the player. This should help curb scenes getting too swamped with Gravespawn.
- Buffed Praesidium gunners - added flashlights to guns - very bright when viewed from "down range."
- Fixed male sunken in Wolfvale and Quiet Mountain from having jazz feet when walking on terrain.
- Fixed the red ring around vision not appearing when loading a save where your health is low enough to show said ring.
- Fixed Gravespawn from being able to push you around when they're jumping at you.
- Tweaked enemy AI slightly.
We would like to thank everyone for playing, and for being patient. Thank you everyone for your reports, suggestions, and for being so supportive. It means the world, and we hope we can live up to your expectations and maybe even exceed them. We would also like to extend a special thanks to YouTuber/streamer Raider Reid for his contributions to the project, for providing his voice for this update, and for becoming and being a good friend.
If you want to discuss Dement, ask the devs questions, or just hang out, please feel encouraged to join our Discord server!
https://discord.gg/cCuTevA
Dement Update 0.4.1.9b
- Fixes sewer areas causing rendering both eye images in each eye.
- Minor sewer area performance increase.
- Re-enabled the colliders in the Lily Walk to prevent you from walking off of the path.
- Added glowing eyes to the rest of the enemies that have eyes.
Dement 0.4.1.9 Update
- Wolfvale no longer hitches when loading and unloading areas.
- Items have been added to Wolfvale.
- Prologue walk with Lily has had a visual overhaul and massive performance improvements.
- Buffed female sunken monster - they now switch between direct and predictive aiming, and account for gravity in their aim. Indoor versions no longer stagger to gunfire. They were meant to be a sort of support role monster but they just ended up being too weak, so this buff was much needed.
- Fixed some enemy footstep sounds not playing.
- Fixed enemy AI getting stuck in their attack animations get interrupted a certain way.
- Switched back to deferred rendering - further testing found it to perform better in most situations.
Dement 0.4.1.8b Update - Performance
- Optimized the heck out of Wolfvale - runs twice as fast now, from 16-18 ms frame times (even with the 0.4.1.8 improvements!) to 6-8 ms.
- Fixed a bug where getting pelted in the face by enemy projectiles could permanently blind you.
- Fixed an objective from Ch.4 not clearing properly.
- Fixed dead enemy blood pools from glowing insanely bright sometimes.
The original 0.4.1.8 notes are below:
Performance is important for VR games, and while Dement was playable, it could have been better. This update took a while to come out because I've been working on not just the performance boosts, but polishing some side areas a bit, making new ones, working on long side quest chains, and some enemies. Thank you for the patience and I hope you enjoy the new performance boosts to Dement! New areas and quests are getting close, but they're not quite ready yet.
Due to the nature of this update, it is possible some visual issues may arise. Text not appearing on signs, things rendering on top of fog, a particular square of ground not having consistent lighting - these are all things encountered during the beta process. Some of them may persist yet - please report them! :D
- Changed rendering from deferred multi pass to forward single pass
- Added 2x MSAA
- Upgraded post processing stack
- New gamma correction effect - more robust, less intrusive. It is actually adjusting the gamma now, not messing with color spaces and post exposure values to try to cover up the gamma issue.
- Dynamic Resolution option added and enabled by default. You can adjust the lower-limit value, or disable entirely if you wish.
- Removed old quality options, they didn't do much but make the game look worse.
- Heavily optimized forest walk scene, removed the ugly bush and put in some new pretty ones.
- Fixed the puzzle in Ch.4 that involves the posing mannequins
- Fixed the park gate key not unlocking the park gate
- Other minor bug fixes
Now that we have the tl;dr list out of the way, I thought maybe some of you might enjoy a peak behind the curtain. ;)
Previously, Dement was using two cameras - one that rendered most of the game, and one that rendered the hands / weapons, UI, and applied the post processing effects. The game was set to deferred rendering for some of the effects, and multi pass was necessary for the post processing to not force each eye to render that double-circle-both-eyes image... you know the one I'm talking about. In other words, single pass would break everything.
So, in order to increase performance, I upgraded the post processing stack to allow single pass (this will usually half the CPU requirements for rendering) and since deferred wasn't necessary any more, switched to forward rendering as well (which in some instances decreased draw calls by over 60%).
At this point, Dement's image quality was very nice, very clear. Supersampling to 150% produced a very crisp image that was running much faster than the previous build at 100% supersampling. Switching to forward rendering unlocked the use of MSAA, and at the lowest setting removed jaggies without introducing any blur, and only increased performance cost by something like half of a millisecond.
So at this point we're at a pretty good place, yeah? Well, some scenes are heavier than others. The forest walk scene in the prologue should come to mind...
As an aside, I went back and switched out that stringy awful looking bush for some new ones. I think the old bush had some rendering issues that increased draw calls a lot as well. New bushes are more efficient and look much nicer. I switched the trees from the desktop versions to the mobile versions. Overall, they look a bit more straight but you don't really get close enough to them to notice any change in quality. I made the LOD scaling on pieces of the terrain much more aggressive, but it isn't terribly noticeable. I changed the shadows a bit and they seem to be better now.
Back to the original point - some scenes are heavier than others. With such a taxing scene so early in the game with these optimizations still not necessarily cutting it, the last obvious option is to force lower resolution. So, an option for dynamic resolution was added that takes the average framerate of the last tenth of a second, compares it to your headset's refresh rate, and if the framerate isn't high enough will decrease resolution by 1%. I used a technique that doesn't blur the image, just makes it more pixelly... pixlier... (red squiggly line says these aren't words). ANYWAY, when your framerate gets better, it will do the opposite - increase resolution by 1%. Note that these values stack with your SteamVR supersampling value so I actually recommend turning that up to at least 120%. However, setting a dynamic resolution lower-limit-value of 80% will result in your lowest target resolution to still be 96%, so play with those numbers until you're satisfied with perfomance to visual quality.
Back to the aside, I actually had GPU frame timings of 8-11 ms in the forest walking scene with dynamic resolution set to 80% lower limit with 100% SteamVR supersample setting. Pretty good!
However, things were not all sunshine and rainbows. The previous ambient occlusion method did not play well with the dynamic resolution, and it rendered on top of fog now. After tinkering with it, the distance fade property fixed the fog issue, and it eventually rendered close to where it was supposed to be. Key word being close... it was jumping around a lot. It was also producing very noticeable full screen artifacts and would look pretty bad at lower resolution scales. Sad day.
With the new post processing stack upgrade, I added a new ambient occlusion method that still looks pretty good. Maybe not as good as the previous one did in some instances, but better in others - especially with dynamic resolution in play. The old ambient occlusion method would cost about 2-2.5 ms to render, the new one costs 1-1.5. It isn't effected by the dynamic resolution either. The choice was clear.
Remember when I said Dement was using two cameras to render things? Now, there was no need. The old ambient occlusion technique looked awful on hands and weapons, which meant it needed the second camera to render them to avoid having the effect applied on them. No longer the case, so the cameras were consolidated into one. I don't have the specifics for the performance increase on this, but it was noticeable.
Finally, after some testing, I found that lowering the texture resolutions was not doing much to increase performance - just potatoed the game. I removed the option to change those in game and have reset everyone's default to max.
Another fun fact - some headsets have higher gamma values than others, so that pesky ol' gamma correction option exists. Previously, I didn't have any control over the gamma. The gamma correction profile was just a mix of effects that darkened the game enough to make it look less washed out. Well, the new post processing stack has an actual gamma adjuster. Previously, I thought Dement looked noticeably worse in the Oculus Rift CV1 compared to the Vive. With the new gamma correction option though... I would probably rather play Dement in a Rift over the Vive these days. It looks fantastic.
Anyhow, thanks for the read, and thanks for supporting Dement. I hope everyone had a good holiday and is looking forward to new upcoming content in Dement!
Dement 0.4.1.7 Update
- Added new stat boosting items (temporary effects)
- Adrenaline - Increases stamina regeneration by 50% for 10 minutes
- Painkiller - Decreases damage received by 25% for 10 minutes
- Black Asphodel - Increases melee damage by 25% for 10 minutes
- Adrenaline - Increases stamina regeneration by 50% for 10 minutes
- Changed antidote's color to blue
- Added gauges to the UI to show the remaining time of these new effects
- Added all lockboxes that contain permanent stat boosting items into the game (at least the ones in areas currently available)
- Added more enemies to Quiet Mountain
- Increased the resolution of some textures using THE POWER OF AI TECHNOLOGY! ENHANCE!
- Added inspections for suppressors to give more information about their durability
- Added information to the tutorial regarding exhaustion - to be clear to everyone, DO NOT ATTACK WITH MELEE WHEN YOUR STAMINA BAR IS FLASHING RED. YOUR DAMAGE IS QUARTERED. ;)
- Changed the scale of the bath tubs in the Twin Elms apartments, truly game changing!
- Added "safety nets" to the Chapter 3 area to prevent players from getting stuck, or pushing themselves out of the map
- Removed the "whoosh" sounds from fists since fists don't really do that IRL, and they would whoosh when climbing and stuff - just not worth the hassle.
- Changed the "seen" and "heard" instincts to be 3D, so you can get an idea of which direction you're being detected in.
- Various bug fixes - Chapter 4 area critical notes not spawning, Lily's old house not spawning being the big ones
The demo has also been updated to reflect the current game, including better non-vive controls, better gamma correction option, sneaking while standing, 3D stealth senses, and some other bug fixes. Sound effects have been added to the weapon pickups to make them a bit more obvious that they've appeared.
If you have previously played the demo and want to give it another shot with the new updates, the demo will now check for a previous version's save and will allow you to reset the timer once. This will also reset progress.
If you're having a good time in Dement, please recommend the demo to friends or strangers, and consider leaving a review on the store page <3
We're switching gears now from QOL to substantial content updates. New side quest chains and stories with new areas incoming!
Dement 0.4.1.6 Update
- Stealth updated - Sneaking is now possible while standing. To achieve this, you must walk slowly allowing at least one second to pass between footsteps. This information is also reflected in the tutorial now. Rejoice, for the achy breaky knees shall no longer taunt you.
- Gamma Correction profile updated - Playing on an Oculus headset and suffering from wicked color banding? Enabling this option will make Dement appear closer to how it should within the headset. It will make streams unwatchably dark, however.
- If you have never interacted with the gamma correction option, you will be prompted in the calibration phase to choose whether to enable it or not. I wholeheartedly do not recommend using it on headsets that do not require gamma correction.
- Inspecting items in the inventory will now vibrate the main hand controller to let you know you're holding the object.
- A grab inspect trigger has been added to the gun in 309 in addition to the traditional inspection trigger. It is broken. You cannot make it go.
- Added barriers to the roads leading out of Wolfvale, excluding the one leading to Quiet Mountain.
- The boss fight in the apartment will now have proper combat-movement stamina costs.
- Various small bug fixes.
Happy holidays and please report any bugs or strange things you find in the official bug report thread on the Steam discussion forums.
Dement Update 0.4.1.5 - Non-Vive Control QOL Improvement
- The option to move snap turning to the thumbstick has been added.
- Reading notes and moving the map has been refined - slowed down, and will take the length of the document into consideration when determining scrolling speed.
- Index controllers can now use either thumbstick or touchpad to navigate the UI comfortably, including scrolling maps and notes.* (Note 1)
- Fixed a bug where going backwards in the very sunken upstairs of the police station would cause the building to seemingly unsink.* (Note 2)
- Added save rooms to the Wolfvale gas station bathroom and grocery store backrooms.* (Note 3)
- Fixed a crash that could occur in Wolfvale involving Praesidium squads.
- Changed it so if you attack a Praesidium member in a squad, it will cause the whole squad to become hostile.
- Other various smaller bug fixes and environment revisions.
Note 1 - Do know, however, Dement doesn't know the difference between your thumbstick or your touchpad. It guesses based on initial touch position - if it is inhumanly centered, it assumes the joystick is in use. If you encounter any odd behavior once or twice while using the touchpad for example, just know that you are skilled in getting the middle of the touchpad touched first. Most people won't notice this problem, but I thought I'd get that out there.
Note 2 - If you encountered this issue and saved, know that you can fix it by entering and exiting the police station armory. Additionally, you can go out the front door to Wolfvale and back in, but that unlocks the front door. Know that you'll still need to escape the station in the expected way, even if you can go out the front. Sorry for the immersion breaking glitch.
Note 3 - Though save rooms were added to two new areas, these are still technically "preview" areas that don't have anything in them currently. Soon enough they will be populated with enemies, items, and quests. The save rooms were added just to decrease the distance between the currently available ones.
As usual, if anything seems bugged or wrong, please report it in the official bug reporting thread on the discussion forums here on Steam. DO NOT BE SHY. ;)
Dement Content Update V0.4.1.3
Items for sale are mostly ammo, but there is a new gun you can purchase - the High Capacity 9mm Handgun! It has stats similar to the normal handgun, but has a capacity of 15+1 instead of 8+1. However, this gun is not threaded for a suppressor like the normal handgun. Trade-offs!
Soon, you will be able to purchase frag and flash grenades from the store as well!
This update also brings a number of bug fixes. Highlights include UI input for rift, and a game breaking bug if you started the game without both controllers being on.
Please (PLEASE) report any bugs you find in the official bug report thread, and feel free to voice any suggestions, concerns, or ideas to improve the game in the discussion forums!