Improvements, improvements & more improvements

This week’s focus was on more performance optimization and the addition/replacement of a couple of systems with assets that provide better performance and/or visual quality. I started by integrating MicroSplat, a very versatile and faster solution for terrain shading. It was a little bit more difficult than I anticipated cause there was a very odd frame drop when looking in certain directions. Took me quite a long time to figure out why it’s happening and implement a solution for it. In the coming weeks I will be expanding on the automatic terrain texturing and will set up MicroSplat to use all its cool features. I also replaced the built-in shadow library with an asset to improve the shadow quality and options. That unfortunately also came with a bug that took quite some time to track down. It turned out to be a bug in the asset itself so I got in touch with the creator. I provided him with a lot of details and he went ahead trying to fix it. We found the erroneous part in the asset and he provided me with a fix which will also soon be available to other customers I hope. In addition to those assets I also updated the project to the most recent Unity long term support version. 

During my testing I also came across another bug that caused the framerate to be significantly lower when creating the game from a savegame compared to when generating from scratch via a seed. Turns out I was missing an update/refresh of a Unity terrain method that caused the terrains to have much more geometry than they should upon creation from a savegame. This was a single line fix once I knew the reason for the frame drops. Finally I spent a bit of time looking into my options on how to best implement the zombies in regards to modularity, ease of integration, moddability and more. I believe I have found a nice approach and will be talking about that in more detail when I start integrating the zombies back into the game. Next week I will focus on getting the next tech demo ready for testing which will include the two biomes I showed in a previous devlog and the new performance improvements implemented since the last demo. For that I will also be adding a few more options in the settings menu. On my computer I do get a framerate increase of about 15-20% compared to the previous version. Depending on the scenario and the game I can even get my frame rate up to 180+ when lowering some settings. Looking forward to seeing how the changes and available options will impact performance on tester devices.

Notable tasks this week:

• Updated to latest Unity LTS version

• Integrated MicroSplat, a versatile and fast terrain shading asset

• Replaced built-in shadow libraries with Next-Gen-Soft-Shadows asset

• Fixed low fps after loading bug

• Zombie implementation research

• Various performance optimizations

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.
Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.