Skunkfrakker & Veelicious
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Phase 2 of 3 COMPLETE! Woot! It’s a couple days late but it’..
🕑 Added 2021-05-26 23:56:00 +0000 UTCPhase 2 of 3 COMPLETE!
Woot! It’s a couple days late but it’s awesome! Sorry about that! Had a murderous bug that was preventing the teleport system from working, so I decided to fix that before stopping to post, make the video, and do emails. Switching gears takes forever for me, so just grinding it out as hard as I could got the fastest results.
Anyway! Other than a few specific things with simple material issues, Besti now uses the new rendering pipeline. The avatar system, mirror system, and a few Besti SDK tools need some new shaders, but other than that we have great performance and new capabilities that weren’t available before.
For instance:
- You can now create shaders using the built-in shader graph in the Besti SDK. You aren’t limited to built-in ones any more as a consequence of the update. Ditch that “Unity Look” and make whatever. I’ll be including a bunch of useful ones.
- Quest and Potato mode graphics no longer look flat and boring. The reason is that the system is so much more efficient that the shaders can do more interesting calculations on each frame than they could before. This brings the Quest’s graphics appearance closer to what it looks like on the PC.
- Quest and Potato also share in the simple post processing effects that they couldn’t before. The world shifts to grayscale when you bring up the menu, for example.
- High and Ultra will be able to enable RTX once that has a few more improvements applied to it. It’s presently a little buggy, but now that we’re on the system, we can patch that in without changing anything once Nvidia/Unity makes it work properly. It is still missing the ability to work on meshed skeletons (like characters--kind of important!) but it works for static objects, and you’ll be able to make RTX stuff in the Besti SDK once that’s up. I’m pretty sure we’re waiting on Nvidia on this one but they are making progress on it regularly, and it’s probably ready for a partial implementation soon.
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All platforms and graphics tiers benefit from a sizeable efficiency increase. You can probably go up a graphics tier and see the same level of performance until RTX becomes an option.
Phase 1 was the major system update to get onto the latest stuff from Unity. Done!
Phase 2 was the graphics overhaul to get onto the new pipeline. Done!
Phase 3 is freaking CONTENT in the new system. Of course that's the stuff that you folks voted for, but even if you're not into that, this benefits all future stuff. Woot! Onward!
The rest of the week I’m going to be doing emails, finishing up dealing with some bugs that remain, and planning on what a good set of expectations for the week should be. This coming Monday’s post shouldn’t be delayed so that’s good <3 I’m targeting getting to inbox 0 by Saturday afternoon so hopefully I can grab a couple more days of programming before Monday, and I shouldn't be 2 days late either <3
Here’s the monster changelog. If you’ve been waiting on an email I’ll get with you shortly! Here’s just the new stuff!
- Installed the new Unity SRP. This is a completely new way to draw graphics to the screen. It is ostensibly superior to the built-in renderer, but is completely different. This will give better performance and superior graphics options once it is set up, and is a requirement to use RTX in the future once that becomes unfucked. This should also permit creators to make their own shaders for things using the built-in shadergraph tool rather than using pre-compiled HLSL shaders in the main build, as shaders can be compiled during compilation in the Besti SDK which Besti can read and apply at runtime.
- Updated SteamVR camera configuration in the opening splash screens.
- Updated SteamVR camera configuration in the main menu.
- Modified the anti-nausea system to work with the new graphics system
- Made a new shader to black out the screen, as the current HLSL solution does not work in the new method of drawing things to VR headsets. Not that it's a huge computation, but I take this as an example of how much more efficient this graphics system is. It takes less than half as much work for the GPU to fade out the screen than it did in previous versions, and there's no increased CPU overhead/GPU overhead from the shader switching behavior like there used to be for additional shaders in a scene. Semi big deal!
- Applied the new blackout shader to PlayerControl, which is the master controller that draws elements visible to the player in Besti.
- Made some new shaders for the cave intro.
- Made a new shader for the main menu graphics that live on top of the fader.
- Updated the post processing system for the new graphics system AND the new version of unity. Incompatible in two directions.
- Made minor modifications to take advantage of some newly developed Quest optimizations within Unity for the Quest builds.
- Made the Potato setting a bit more potato. I want it to run well on an elderly integrated card.
- Made the Quest setting less potato than it was. The graphics updates give us more computational headroom so I can increase the graphics quality to compensate for that.
- Wrote new code to handle the new way of doing dynamic post processing changes. Besti X uses a fullscreen blur, a depth of field, and a saturation adjustment in realtime, and they changed how this works completely in the new version which required all new code to support it. Wasn't expecting that but I probably should have. Besti's system is somewhat complicated in this regard so this took a while.
- Made a new polygon water system. The old one didn't work with the new graphics system, so I made a better one and a tool so you can make one too.
- Made a new water shader for potato mode that runs easier on systems without GPUs. It's not particularly heavy but god knows what will be mixed with it so let's make it a little simpler for those computers.
- Fixed a logical issue that could cause the settings to not be saved in game if you reset the settings and then immediately exited the game without closing the menu. It now immediately writes these changes to disk after you confirm you want to do it rather than adding it to a work queue.
- Updated the in-game fade in/ fade out effects to work with the new graphics system.
- Updated the menu follower system to make it work with the new system.
- Updated the camera tracking logic to make it work with the new system. Why the fuck did they remove "On Camera Prerender?" What a silly thing to remove. It has a similar equivalent but it's not quite the same.
- Rewrote the way to address the post processing system so changes to graphics settings apply immediately instead of needing to reload the scene you're in. Now it happens at that moment. What an affair that was.
- Updated the teleport system's screen blanking behavior to be compatible with the new system. This may require additional work I haven't tested this specific fix on Quest but I’ll check that this week.
- Altered the light rendering system to make the lights cast better shadows.
- Updated the Besti SDK invisible teleporter tool to work with the new graphics system.
- Updated more materials all over the system. A few remain that need to be done. Mirror, Avatars, some props provided in the SDK, etc...
