"If you build it, they will come." One of the best feelings for any game developer is releasing their creations for their players. There are different routes that could be taken, be it releasing a game completely for free, making a free-to-play (F2P) game, releasing through digital distribution, and many others. When releasing your creation is the goal, success is all about being able to provide your users with a high performance, entertaining, and immersive experience.
At long last, we are nearing the end of our journey, of the creation and distribution of our CryENGINE creations. There are many different scenarios that would require you to send your game/level or even assets to others for them to play, review, or even help. This chapter will take you through some of the important last steps, which you will need to take before sharing your content.
In this chapter, we will:
- Profile our level's performance in Sandbox
- Save Level Statistics
- Learn how to enable Debug Draw modes
- Optimize levels with VisAreas and Portals
- Use light boxes and light areas
- Activate and deactivate layers
- Register our project, team, and files on the CryDev database
Let's begin by discussing some of the profiling tools available within the Sandbox application.
Before we unleash our creations to the world, it is very important to always be aware of our game's performance and how it will affect your player's experience. CryENGINE has a variety of different, built-in debugging and profiling tools. As you will soon find out, some of them are specific to certain subsystems and are useful for advanced users of the technology. Other tools, however, are very useful for most engine users in their regular, daily workflow. The next section lists the profiling CVARs and commands that each programmer, artist, and level designer working with CryENGINE should know.
The proverbial first line of defense for developers in terms of profiling and reading performance in Sandbox is the display info CVAR. This is activated and displayed in most cases by default; however, we will discuss how to enable it as well as explore some of the values it is communicating to you.