So here is a bit of an update on the game’s progress over the past couple of months. As mentioned in earlier posts, November was spent redoing existing art and making sure that things ran smoothly. Unity has a hard cap on the size of procedural textures at 2048×2048, which is a problem. I cannot get high quality brick textures without stretching if I cannot get a texture of 4096×4096 generated. I’ll have to consider splitting the wall bricks between multiple textures/materials, which would exponentially increase the number of draw calls per frame. The only way to avoid this is to not use procedural textures, which would be a huge pain, and bloat the file size of the game, but it may be necessary.
In December, I optimized the game for LOD Groups and doubled the player’s view distance. The game runs above 60 fps on a computer with a 2.6 GHz processor and 8 GB of DDR3 RAM, which is good in my book. Performance is a constant concern for me given the amount of things happening in the game at any given time. That is, transitioning between chunks is an ideally seamless experience. Minecraft hitches for a few frames whenever new geometry is generated, which is what I am trying to avoid. Unfortunately, the Unity engine, as much as I love it, does not support multi-threading, so I cannot run the mesh-generation algorithm in the background.

Vague-non-spoilers: Yesterday I created new art assets for the trees to make them a bit creepier. I’ve also created models that relate to their life cycle. I’ll insert these elements into the game in the coming days.

Greenlight

The Greenlight page is at 70% of the way to reaching the top 100, with over 16k unique visitors. Steam does not surface a ton of information other than that. I can use your help in promoting the game and getting people to vote. If anyone has any suggestions for how to market the Greenlight page, let me know!

Happy Holidays!

2 thoughts on “Wrapping Up 2012

  1. Nice to see an update, I really like following your progress as you go along. :)For textures, are you using Substance, or custom code?About threaded procedural mesh generation: where is the problem occurring? I know you can’t call into most of the Unity API from a separate thread, but do you need to do that to generate new arrays of vertices, triangles and uvs? If it’s just about assigning newly generated meshes to MeshFilter components, maybe you could implement a queuing mechanism.

  2. Hey mzandvliet!

    I am using Substance. Just looked it up, and apparently  2048×2048 is the highest supported resolution on many graphics cards, which may be why Unity locks at this number when importing a substance material. I may have to take the hit and have multiple materials for the bricks.

    Multithreading: I’ll take another shot at this. Synchronization was the issue. I am thinking of using ThreadHelper or Executors Framework to help manage it.
    Thanks for checking in on my game! I’ll have to hit up the forums to see what I can do about texturing.

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