Procedural vegetation placement & new vegetation renderer

This week’s focus was on testing the performance of the game in a build and adding vegetation generation support. On Monday I created the first build with the new generation pipeline to test its performance. I was surprised when I saw that the generation didn’t work in the build. I started investigating and also talked to the developer of MicroVerse, the asset I use to do much of the generation. Since the asset was not specifically built for my use case, meaning for runtime usage, none of the shaders the asset is using were packed into the build. It took me a little over a day to figure it all out and get it working in builds. After satisfying performance benchmarks in builds I continued with some experiments on vegetation placements instead of the originally planned biome placements. The reason for that was to first make sure vegetation placement does work in general before adding code that determines where vegetation goes. Since Unity’s vegetation rendering system doesn’t perform great I also added the asset called Nature Renderer which I acquired and familiarized myself with in the weeks prior. The rendering performance for the vegetation I was testing with went from completely unplayable performance to really amazing performance. The implementation of vegetation placement and the rendering asset went pretty smoothly which was a welcoming change from the issues I had earlier in the week. I think the new vegetation rendering asset might also make modding support for vegetation possible which would be another big win for the decision to step away from the old rendering system. I’ll be looking into that when the time comes but I am quite confident that it is possible to add that support down the road. Since my girlfriend had Friday off I decided to also take that day off to spend time with her. With only Thursday left I decided to do a more chill task with no risk of failure - learning Unity’s new UI system called UI Toolkit. All the UI currently in the game is built on the old Unity UI system which has a lot of performance issues. Since UI Toolkit after years of development finally became production ready I want to use it for all my UI going forward. Over time I will also port my old UI over to UI Toolkit. I now have a good understanding of the general workflow and will be using it to create the world generation setting menu available in the next tech demo.

Notable tasks this week:

• Fixed generation issues in builds

• Tested generation performance in builds

• Added vegetation placement support to world generation pipeline

• Add Nature Renderer asset to replace built-in vegetation rendering

• Started learning UI Toolkit (Unity’s new UI system)

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.