Need Optimization Tips Before My Deadline

Have a project I’ve been working on for a while now, and since I’m so close to being done I made Monday the 15th a self-set deadline to finish work on it, regardless of where I’m at.

The main thing I have left to do is just whatever optimization I can, and I was looking for some basic suggestions that can help me improve my fps. When unlit, I’m over the 30 fps mark, but when lighting is in play it varies from over 30 to as low as right under 10. The latter area is obviously what I’m hoping to improve.

The main spot that triggers this is an alley where I have six high-detail cars and four flame particle systems jammed in an alley as wreckage. Visually, this is one of the most important spots to have look as good as possible, so the vehicles need to stay as-is and I’d rather not degrade the quality on the particle systems if I can help it. I’ve also carefully considered the layout visually for this space and I can’t reduce the number of vehicles or fires I have as a solution. I AM open to augmenting them as long as it falls within the goals I just mentioned.

For my part, I’ve already taken half of the six emitters out of the flames’ particle system, improved the LOD Distance Check Time to 2 and set the system to not cast shadows. I also set what vehicles I could to not cast shadows, and set no collision on all but one that the character can touch to prevent any collision calculations for them.

In general in my level, I have used the Black Unlit Material where possible (my level is set at night, so I was able to get away with that a lot). I disabled collision on everything the player can’t touch, I disabled occlusion on my smaller objects, I disabled shadows on everything I could get away with (I refer back to the night setting comment, ha) and most importantly for improving performance, I dramatically lowered the Volumetric Lightmap Detail Cell Size.

Any suggestions for dealing with the specific scene I mentioned and for improving the level as a whole would be welcome. In particular, any suggestions on improving performance related to lighting and to particle system usage would be useful. For all the terms I’ve used, bear in mind I’m relatively new to optimizing and lighting techniques in general, so if you could put it in layman’s terms the best you can that’d be much appreciated.

Oh, and if it helps, these are the average stat units I have on that one wreckage area in particular:

Frame - 130
Game - 28
Draw - 21
GPU - 126

Thanks for reading, any questions just ask.

Kind of need help on this guys, it’s time-sensitive. Please don’t just ignore it.

Still waiting.

if you can separate the interior and exterior of the car up into separate meshes you could apply their lods individually. which could be helpful since if the player is outside the car the interior probably doesn’t need to rendered at the the same lod.
the tires could also be separated, that way they could just be culled entirely when the player is on the opposite side of the car.

you could also try to changing the elevation of the terrain or putting some rubble between the cars/ flames. you just want to avoid the player having too many polys and transparent objects in the screen at any given angle.