Devlog progress video

In the wake of taming rendering in unity for limited standalone devices such as the older quest 2, I needed a change of pace. I remodelled the houses, and decided to remove the trees entirely until everything else worked. Of course, in game development, it is very rare that everything “just works” new problems arise just as swiftly as you can cull them. Alas I decided to build the game for testing purposes and just fly around a bit and why not make a short video showcasing some of the progress while doing so.

Besides that, progess is as expected. Now that everything else works, something has to break. I overhauled the UI from the desktop interface it was originally designed for to fit more appropriately for the openxr experience. This had me realizing how Time.timeScale influences control on OpenXR devices. Using a small statemachine for controling game states was quickly implemented instead, and everything behaves as it should..

..that is apart from the janky textures and annoying ui. The player is able to pilot the balloon around on the small planet and shoot sparking presents towards innocent recipients on the planet. Joy to the world.

Parts that significantly improved performance was removing shadows from materials which were not strickly neccesary. Further improvements had to be done on the rendering pipeline as textures were z-fighting which is incredibly distractin. I tweaked several parameters, Deferred instead of Forward renderer, removing shadows entirely, static batching, metalic materials over albedo, but what yielded the most significant improvement was changing the camera near clip plane from 0.01 to 0.125. Now without most of the z-fighting and without time to redesign all trees and models, it has to be the way it is, I’ll consider it another lesson learned.

For now, I will just leave it here, and hope you enjoy the video.