Hello Everyone,

Lately I have been working on “The finer details” of my game. This includes optimizations across the board. I have implemented my interactive doors system to which included a few days of research and optimization on their design. As it turns out, I still have much to learn in the concept of rigidbodies and their uses. But for the most part my doors are complete. I still need to implement my lock and key system for said doors, that should come along in the next few weeks.

I have also optimized my audio usage. Who would have guessed that setting an audiosource on every single object you want audio to come from would eat up resources? So I cut my audiosources in half just about and balanced the ones that remained to cover the same area with less usage. I will also be looking into an audio occlusion system to block 3D audio from passing through walls.

Lighting, lighting, lighting. I battled this week for a good week solid. I kept having issues with some of my dynamic point lights not working, even though they were all replicas of one another, some simply didn’t appear. After looking at the problem from countless angles and attempting to get help from multiple development communities, I figured out the issue by simple step by step troubleshooting via the player camera. I ticked and unticked boxes and rose and lowered bars until I came across occlusion culling on the camera. When I unticked this, all the lights worked perfectly. This lead me to the breakthrough that the problem I was having was not with the lights themselves, but with the design of my occlusion culling system. Well, there are only a couple options in this system so it didn’t take me long to realize I needed to lower my “Smallest Occluder” setting, from the default setting of 5, down to 1 and rebake the occlusion culling. This resolved my issue. So somehow, some aspect of the structural design was blocking the camera’s theoretical view of the object that was not visible to the naked eye.

I have added new sound and visual effects. Cryo steam is my latest one. I’m sure there’s a more scientific name for this, which I will look into, but the basic premise is deadly exhaust from busted cryo pipes which will freeze you to death almost immediately. I also put together a sound effect for this asset that fits nicely, albeit still requires some tweaking.

Whilst resolving my lighting issue, I designed a new “Emergency Lighting System”. This system will be found throughout the map as a flashing red light with an alarm attached to it. Very simple, yes, but it adds a lot to the mood of the game.

My next goals are to continue working on random optimizations as I move along, but also begin to match up room design with audiologs. I want each room to tell a story as the player progresses through the game. This is a storyteller first and foremost after all. So I want the audiolog to fit the room and the room to fit the audio log. I want the room to show the story that is being told in some way. I want to give purpose and life to every room, which is a tad harder to do given the genre of the game ^^

All in all, I feel I’ve covered a lot since my last update. It may be some time before I put together another update as I wish to spend my time focusing on the design and details of the rooms and this will take quite a bit of time with few details to report from it.

As always, thanks for catching up with me!