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I have also realized another reason why I should not make a full architectural switch to Unity DOTS for my future projects are the long list of assets and tooling that I purchased over the years from the Unity Asset Store. I had purchased a lot of these assets because they looked really cool and I knew that at some point I would have to use them but never had. Most were developed with the typical GameObject workflow in mind and might not work 100% or at all with Unity DOTS. I've thought about that in the past and accepted that I'll likely have to rewrite those tools from scratch to fit my needs but that is a lot of working that I don't necess...

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Unity DOTS is amazing but annoying. After working with it for a few weeks, I can finally say what my number one problem is with it. You cannot smoothly go full ECS with Unity . I think this is where my previous game engine worked wonders. It was implemented in such a way that allowed anything and everything to be an entity with components and systems. Unity just doesn't work that way. Things like collisions, serialization, cameras, and even rendering with shaders is more complex than what it needs to be. I am currently looking at other options. I am trying to identify my underlying issue though. I believe my switch to DOTS was not justified. ...

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Another thing off the list. The player now has an inventory. While the inventory is very primitive compared to a normal survival game, it does classify as an inventory. The player can store as many apples as they want and they can eat the apples by pressing the "1" key. No longer can you eat it straight off the ground. Last two things on the list are buildables and fixing the death when going too far from the island. As for the buildables, I am thinking of creating a smoothie machine where you can "input" your apples into the machine and it will spit out a smoothie. I am not going to work on this tonight since it will likely take a lot of pla...

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Here is a quick screenshot of the UI working. It correctly displays health and food amounts. I just ended up going with what I know best which is a player event bus. It has an event for health changed and food changed. Any system that updates the player stats component will call these events and the UI subscribes to them. While I don't like the idea of calling these events every frame, it is a small game that isn't going to be published on anything major like Steam (it isn't really meant for the public), so if it runs 120+ FPS on my computer then I think its alright. Going forward, I think it would be best to find a different solution or limi...

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Finally got another task checked off the list of TODOs. Player can now walk around and feed themselves (though there is no UI yet). I decided to go almost full ECS. Any system that I program for this project going forward will be ECS or at least be attempted in ECS. The main reason for the switch is because I love ECS and how it forces composition over inheritance. If you're curious as to my first documented experiments with an ECS, I'd recommend checking out the Battles: Game flare. That has some posts with my previous project that used Raylib and EnTT. The first thing I worked on were trees. I wanted them setup to be data driven spawners fo...

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Last night I read up on shaders and grass shaders. I was able to implement something using GPU instancing and was extremely happy with the results. FPS nearly tripled with the same scene. Turns out, URP using SRP Batching and was batching together all my grass and tanking performance. Even with "GPU instancing" explicitly checked on the shader, it still didn't work. So I just ended up writing my own shader to do this. There are a few issues that I will point out now: Only the main directional light cast shadows onto the grass I believe alpha clipping is causing little dark noise spots in the distance in some lighting scenarios Performance sti...

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I've been working on the grass for a while now and I think I am hitting the limits of Unity's terrain detail functions. I hate extending current functionality, especially if it wasn't made by me. It requires work arounds and more trade offs than I like. It's good for getting something quick out but not something where I need to squeeze every bit of performance. The grass does look visually appealing but doesn't run more than 40 FPS in dense fields. I'd like to point out that I am always benchmarking this using my ultra wide monitor with no resolution downscaling so its rendering a 5120x1440 texture (multiple textures technically) 40 times per...

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I have been working on rendering grass billboards on the terrain for a couple of hours now and while I did accomplish this task, I did not accomplish it in a way that I like. A lot of this has to do with my inexperience with different rendering techniques and optimizations that are preventing me from getting it to look the way I want it to look. Despite looking at a lot of high level overviews on YouTube, I have failed to replicate the exact implementation. I do not have any more time to work on this grass so I'll just have to be comfortable with less dense grass fields. It still accomplishes its job of breaking up the ground texture though, ...

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The terrain now has a slightly improved transition line. You can no longer see the pixels I showed in the last few screenshots. I did this by increasing the splatmap resolution so we can fit more pixels in the same area and by fiddling with the texture layer heightmap blend map. A typical terrain shader with this enabled will require a height map of a texture to be provided. When two textures are overlayed, it will compare each pixel of a texture to same pixel location of another texture. Which ever value is greater will be the portion of the texture that is displayed. This is what allows a sand texture to accumulate inside the crack of a bri...

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I've gone through a couple of games and took various screenshots of the beaches that I could find in those games. There are a couple of patterns that I found that I need to incorporate into my game. I don't want to get in depth on these patterns so I'll just write a list and show you some of the screenshots that I found. Beach to grass textures are always blended smoothly unlike my game which has harsh transitions Texture blending has a very high resolution (or at least someway to combat "blurry pixels") Some of the more realistic games have low quality (compared to what I was thinking I needed) textures PBR is used extensively to give a "wet...