Hey!
Daniel here bringing you another update! Today I will go through what progress I have made since the last update. I have been working on a tileable seabed, LOD system and I have also managed to fix a bug with the camera shutter effect.

Tileable seabed
So I was going to make a level we can use for test purposes, but I rather quickly noticed that the seabed we had was not tilable, and I mean far from tileable. So I headed into blender and made a new seabed that is tileable so we can make levels with any desired size without any hassle. When I imported the seabed to Unity it came to mind that… well this seabed is not smooth at all and it looks really bad.

But since I haven’t worked so much with blender and I have not been toying around with import settings I didn’t know you could pretty easily fix this. So all after some googling i found out that all I needed to do was to check the import settings for the object and set the Normals to Calculate instead of Import. With that, boom, issue fixed.

LOD
For the first time I have been trying out to use LOD(Level Of Detail) in a game. I followed a tutorial on youtube and after some fiddling around and tweaking i finally got it to work.
So for those who don’t know what LOD does, I’ll try to explain it as simple as i can.

You basically create multiple versions of your current mesh, each mesh with a lower polygon count. So let’s say your highest quality mesh has 10,000 polygons, then your next mesh might have 5,000 and then the next might have 1,000. So what happens is when you move further away from the object it switches to a lower quality mesh and that way it won’t render so much details and therefore it helps increase the performance.

So far I have been doing this with the seabed mesh. The current map I am working on has four planes, so this might not be a massive performance boost, but I learned how to use it and how it works. If I want to, I can add LOD to a lot of stuff in our game like fishes, the big rock walls and so on to increase the performance.

That’s basically what I have been working on since the last time. But oh! Let’s not forget that I fixed a bug with the camera shutter effect. If you would to take a lot of photos in a short burst, the effect would get stuck midway through, but that’s fixed now!

Next thing I will be working on is some controller vibrations, the basic controller system of the game is all set so now I can finally jump into that and play around a bit.

With that said, thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys soon!
// Daniel