Rendering issues and crash reported about template-beat-em-up

[eh-jogos]

@agmathew I traded some comments with the poster on reddit and we found out his GPU is a GeForce GTX 765M (in this comment)

So the hypothesis that the problem is the video memory usage is quite plausible, and for reference, I searched for the release that of that GPU and it is some time in 2013, so we are probably looking at a pretty old notebook with hybrid graphics that uses this mobile GPU.

To make things faster I'm only cutting the "effects" textures in half for both the area and grenade attacks as this has already reduced the memory usage by almost 50%, from 2.64 GiB to 1.38GiB on GPU texture usage memory.

But if we have more time and budget maybe we could think of a system to split the level in smaller scenes and load them seamlessly, but I don't think this is a good time for it as load_threaded_request still has quite a few bugs, I had noticed the wrong status report one, and then found the others.

I'm leaving this open for now though as I'll wait to see what our friend on reddit replies once he tests again, but besides what's written here I'm out of ideas.

What do you think? Do you think it's worth to try to instance tax man dynamically even if we don't split the stage is smaller scenes?

I'm kinda worried that this will not give any result as either taxman's tscn will already be loaded and just waiting to be instanced, and thus the textutres already on the memory, or we might have hiccups trying to load the taxman's scene if we try to load it in the background and it's not ready when we need it.

[agmathew]

Let's just scale the effects textures by half for now and start with that. We can revisit the load_threaded_request once things have stabilized a little. The dynamic loading only really helps if we're unloading other things, otherwise we're just delaying the crash from the beginning to when the player reaches the Tax Man. It also makes me wonder if there's an opportunity for a more generalized solution where we make it easy to load and unload scenes in our templates.

[eh-jogos]

@agmathew The template already has a very simple "background loader" for loading the game scene while you are on start menu.

For example, if you open the game and go to how to play and is reading the instructions there, chances are that when you click play you won't see the "loading bar" at the bottom and won't have to wait for it to finish loading, I only show that if the scene hasn't finished loading yet.

I think that can be reused in other projects, but whatever we do to split the level itself in smaller parts might be too specific.

[eh-jogos]

@agmathew also I'm closing this one for now, it's a very specific bug, we found the source but even reducing the images on tax man still haven't solved it for the user on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/yv5cgd/comment/iws5syo/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Only thing that did was removing tax man as a whole. I think we should get back to this once godot 4 is stable and try to find other images that maybe are too big, but also refactoring stage 01 to be a collection of smaller scenes will probably be the best solution, and it's a new feature so kind of out scope for this particular bug.