Hello sanctuary seekers.
As you may have noticed, not a lot has happened with the game over the last few months.
This has been due to me moving house, finding a new job, working like a lunatic and getting side tracked on other projects but tonight I’m starting work on After Sanctuary again and I’m basically starting the game again.
Most of the code from the old project was written under Unity 4.x and isn’t really reusable under 5.x. Examples of this include the vehicle physics and vehicle mesh deformation which just don’t work they way I intended them to in Unity 5.x.
It’s going to be easier to start again rather than try to bash code around that’s around a year old to try to make it fit.
Some of the old code will be reused but most of it will be discarded.
So, where am I starting?
One of the biggest problems in creating a game like this with a large fairly open world is handling the sheer size of the game area.
Most of the game play is set outside on a huge terrain (around 100 KM in total area).
I can’t load all of this into the memory at once so it needs to be split into chunks and streamed in and out.
There are different ways to solve this problem and I’ve chosen to split the main area into different scenes and load them in the background as they are needed.
If you can imagine a huge terrain 10 KM x 10 KM split into a grid 1 KM by 1 KM in size I’d have 100 separate grid tiles.
Each of these will be a separate scene and they will be loaded and unloaded in the background depending on the proximity of the player.
That way, I’m only loading the immediate playing area into memory at any point and I can present a far larger game area than before with no loading screens by streaming the rest of the world in and out.

The picture is of my test terrain which is 100km square.