Performance, visuals and skill-trees

This past weekend we have made huge gains on the weapon and bullet system for DD2 and we have locked-in the features that can make each gun feel unique and powerful.  

And as we were testing some of the more advanced and wild feature combinations, we noticed our first performance stuttering.  We decided, for now, to turn off bullet particles and that brought performance back within acceptable levels.  I have a 10 year old laptop that I want to try and make the benchmark for performance, and it is still running smooth on that machine.

We still want to make the game look amazing and impactful, but with respect to performance.  Maybe we will need to implement an options system to turn on/off special visuals to improve performance on some older machines.  It could also be inefficient coding, and maybe later a 2nd pass at some of the more cumbersome systems will improve performance.

We are also struggling with how to work with player progress, skill trees, weapon unlocking and upgrading.  Juggling with the idea of using skill points to unlock weapons in the skill tree, then using special color-fragments (gained by salvaging weapons you don't want in the field) to craft them.  Unlocking them in the skill tree will also add them to the random drops during a level, with bosses and mini-bosses more likely to drop unlocked weapons.