Art Demo Success & Engine Update Failure

This week’s focus was on getting the first art demo out to testers and getting an initial benchmark for the photorealistic graphics. I started by implementing a very basic options menu so testers have an easier time changing graphics settings to test out their impact on performance on their hardware. There are currently only the absolute essential options available but there will be new ones added over time to include things like vegetation rendering, weather and others. I’ve provided the art demo to all the testers that have shown interest and already got a lot of feedback from the performance benchmarks. I am super happy with the performance improvements people reported back to me. This makes me very confident that continuing with the photorealistic graphics is the right path as I don’t see any major roadblocks that could make it impossible in the future. Finally I did attempt to update to the most recent Unity LTS version but experienced crashes in the game after the update. After 2 days of investigating I have a pretty good idea by which package the crash is caused by but I haven’t been able to pinpoint it yet. Unfortunately that means I had to revert the entire update to the state right after the art demo in order to do further investigation. I will be doing engine updates in smaller increments next week in order to check those versions for crashes until I find the version that has introduced the crash. Since I do believe it’s related to an official Unity package, which if true means that I’ll have to create a separate project for reproduction and create a bug report for the Unity team to investigate. That would also mean that I have to wait until a bug fix is provided before I can update to the latest version. However, with this pretty sad update failure came also a good discovery. It looks like my performance in the game went up by another 10 fps after the update so there appears to be some decent performance improvements to the engine itself. Always great to get some free performance improvements. Hopefully I have more information about the crash in the next devlog.

Notable tasks this week:

• Added basic options menu

• Prepared and distributed art demo v1 which had amazing performance results

• Conducted an engine update which had to be reverted due to the game crashing

• Various small improvements & bug fixes

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

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.