BIOASSHARD UPDATE 1/30/2026 (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

It’s been quite some time since my last report.

As you can imagine, the work keeps on going. We have no time to rest, not even to publish a report 😁…

As mentioned in the previous report (and seen in the stream) I’m working on animations 😏, but not only on that.

Mr. Versus mentioned it previously that I was also working on some stuff related to the dismemberment system and the enemies, and now that I finished with that, I’ll tell you about it:

Do you remember that poll about how necessary you consider the ability to dismember enemies’ legs to make them crawl?

Well, that was, because with the update to UE5 and the new enemy models, the dismemberment system stopped working, including but not limited to a fatal error crash when a part of an enemy was dismembered. But I knew that if I told you that previous to making the poll, you’d probably chose your option based on “not having to wait even more to get a broken system fixed” but what I wanted was your honest thoughts on that and, the chosen option with more votes was that “it’s a must have”. So, I had to fix it no matter what. It took a couple weeks, because there were multiple parts affecting that system, and as with some other systems I had to fix already, I took the chance to upgrade and improve it. But how it was improved is better to keep it as a surprise for when you play it… all I’ll say now is that, the crawling enemies are now… more “active” 😂.

The crawling part of the enemies was something that wasn’t looking very good on these new models, especially the animation part. They were clipping a lot through the ground, like the arms from the hands to the elbows were inside the ground not to mention the leg/s. And that’s also something I “fixed”. I mean, it’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than how it was.

Making and/or fixing animations also require all the extra processes of adding SFX, anim Notifies and Sync Markers that also consume the lots.

While fixing these and because UE5 never cease to amaze me, it decided to break the Nav Link system. These Nav Links are what allow the enemies to jump gaps or over obstacles, as well as opening doors. The doors kept working but not the jumps. But I quickly fixed this with an improved approach that now generate the Nav Links in a procedural way and what’s even better, it allows for more than one Nav Link per Jump. This means, that before only one enemy could jump per jump spot, even if there was enough space for more than one enemy to jump. Now that’s not a problem anymore 😊.

Another thing I’ve been working on is related to the performance. I know that the game didn’t have a release yet and so I can’t know how it will perform on your machine/s but I want it to be as optimized as possible. So, I took a few steps towards that:

First thing was to upgrade the project to a newer UE5 version. This one is supposed to run between 15~35% better overall, but it had one problem (this is a problem present every time you want to upgrade a project that uses third party plugins) that some plugins used in Bioasshard were abandoned in the older version I was using. Good thing is that you have access to the source code as part of Epic’s EULA standards, so you can update and recompile them yourself (if you know how to, of course).

Lucky enough, these plugins were easy to upgrade and the few with errors, were easy to solve in C++ and recompile.

Apart from the supposed 15~35% better performance, I went a bit deeper and added more options to the Graphic Settings Menu. So now you’ll be able to select which method of Global Illumination do you want to use (or even turn it off completely) along with its quality. The same goes for the Reflections, Anti Alias, VRAM and also the used API (DirectX 11, 12 or Vulkan).

All this is in hope that everyone will be able to run it just fine without performance lacking the experience.

So yeah, I’ve been doing all that along with the animations stuff.

Mr. Versus on the other hand have been busy with the levels as you’ve seen already. I must admit I get very impressed every time I see something new about these new levels 😍. But I forced him to stop, while I was updating the engine version and now, he has to update his engine version as well so he can continue working on it (you cannot use two different engine versions in the same project 😅).

Now, a couple things before calling this a dev report 🤣

First, sorry for the long wall text (especially with no visuals added) but I still wanted to inform you about the stuff that’s been done during these weeks.

As a fellow dev told me: “Even though there may be weeks (or even entire seasons) where the development work isn't very noticeable to the public, behind the scenes the pressure from the environment, the personal demands, and ultimately, the progress of professional goals never stop, leading to results that are (will be* in this case) even more tangible than those achieved when you can show something in screenshots and/or videos.”

And secondly, out of curiosity, I’ll leave you a poll, to see how old are your GPUs. And because only one poll can be added at once, I’ll check the multiple answers options but it’s just for the two categories of answers you can see on it (Graphic API supported and dedicated RAM). And that’s basically the question for the poll:

How much dedicated RAM does your GPU have and which API supports? (here it’s important you only chose one, ie if your GPU supports DX11 and 12, chose only 12 and if doesn’t support any DX but Vulkan, then Vulkan, otherwise ignore Vulkan 😂).

So, this will wrap this report up. Now it’s time to get back to work.

Much love everyone 💖

Until next time 😊.

-Meguido