Here is a screenshot of the grass shader working on my terrain. Performance took a hit when porting over from my test scene to my main scene. I'm thinking it has something to do with overdraw since now grass blades are at different heights. Hard to say for sure without debugging. It looks good and still runs better than the default shader at twice the density.
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...
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...
I ended up not finishing the project over the weekend which is a shame but I did end up learning which was always the end goal. I think I'm going to spend time learning about grass and how to render tons of billboards without slowing using the current project as a benchmark.
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, ...
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...
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...
Last post I’m going to be making for tonight as I am heading to bed. Right now im trying to figure out what I can do to improve the look of my island as it stands right now. There are a lot of obvious things that I am missing such as modeled ground detail, physical grass, trees, vegetation, etc. However, I think my next action should be getting direct references from my inspirations. Mainly Rust and Ark: Survival Evolved. I’d also like to gather some references from other games such as Unturned, Muck, and Battlefield 1. Here are some of the questions I want answered: What does each individual texture looks like? How does it tile? What extra d...
I have just finished texturing the terrain and adding a few rocks modeled in Blender (it's just a single mesh). I used a script that allows me to customize how many rocks I'd like to place, the area to place them, min/max ranges for randomized rotation and the same for scale. When clicking the editor button to generate prefabs, it picks N randomized points on a flat plane (N being number of prefabs I'd like to place). It then raycasts downwards until it hits a collider (which is the terrain). Then it instantiates the object, scales it randomly within the range I set, and rotates it randomly within the range that I set. It runs in two passes. ...
The reason why I added screenshots to my blog is because I wanted to visually show what Gaea looks like and the map that I went with. Gaea is a free software that "industry professionals" use to generate landscapes. It uses nodes that connect together in order to form complex details. If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend you do, even if you are not into game development. It's really fun seeing what you can create. I started my island off with a simple height map file. This file was not generated by Gaea but instead a website I found online. It gives me a good base to go off of. Here is what that height map looks like compared to what i...
This is the first image test post that I am making. Hopefully I got this on the first try. I am using Vercel Blob Storage in order to upload files like images and display them on my site. There was a bit of security that I had to sacrifice since post content is limited on what elements it can create. I also added functionality to display YouTube videos on here in case I want to show off anything that requires video footage. That was a bit tricky but hopefully it works. IFrame's are annoying. Here is a picture of my sweet little kitty named Murphy. She's about a year old as of posting this. Picture was taken using my Canon EOS 450D last Septem...
I've been looking at a few options for getting the terrain built for the game. In a perfect world, I'd spend the time building my own terrain generation system. However, I know I'll get stuck on it for a very long time due to the amount of features I'd want. When generating terrain for a survival game, you could have things like biomes, temperature, different prefabs spawned for the ecosystem that area of the terrain is in, etc. All very cool things that require a lot of programming to get generating quickly and nicely. This is even more difficult when you want to add things such as caves since most terrains are built using a height map. Ther...
I really didn't want to go through the whole process of making my own character controller because they are boring to make. A lot of my projects in Unity are first person controllers and I never reuse my controllers because they are all terribly made. I decided to try out a prebuilt system and found one that seemed to be pretty good. Easy Peasy First Person Controller is what I ended up going with. I did end up having to customize it a bit, but that is expected with any project. The first thing I noticed was that this controller seemed to have the functionality built for Unity's new input system but didn't use it. In fact, the only player inp...
Starting a third project today. I'd like to get it done this weekend. I'm going to do something to help finish which is define a set of goals that I want to accomplish. These goals are things that need to be in the game and visible to me as a player. I want to build a survival game on an island. Something small but something with decent content. Ideally, something I can release to the public to play without many bugs. Here are the goals: I want to be able to move around an island I want to be able to die spectacularly when swimming to far from the island I want to have only hunger that depletes slowly and affects health depending on the amoun...
Just added flares to the blog site so now I can select which post belongs to which project. Currently, I only have two projects that I am working on personally. Battles and this blog. There are only two flares as a result. The list may explode over time but until then, this flare solution is pretty basic and easy to use.