Devlog - August 28th 2022

High Definition Render Pipeline Research and Testing

This week didn’t at all go as originally planned. After I started testing the zombie customization with the UMA asset I noticed that the performance was not as good as I hoped for. I considered my options and decided to take a massive detour, which if it works out, would elevate the visual quality of the project and provide a few new optimization methods. This detour was researching and testing Unity’s high definition render pipeline. This pipeline is aiming to offer projects the most visual fidelity in the Unity Engine. This render pipeline has never been a consideration for my project because until recently I wasn’t using photorealistic graphics. A render pipeline switch comes with quite a bit of asset converting to make everything work with the pipeline’s requirements. Since I haven’t worked with the HDRP before I spent a couple days researching, reading and testing a lot of its features. Throughout the week I had ups and downs whenever I hit a low performance that would prevent me from realistically switching pipelines without destroying the game’s performance. Luckily I always found the right settings or workflows after some time to keep my hopes alive. I even got better performance for certain parts of the game such as static object rendering thanks to new optimization techniques not available in the builtin render pipeline.

After a week of researching and testing I want to take the step and start the conversion at the beginning of next week. Since this may be a lengthy and potentially complicated process I will be doing this in small steps while also working on a few other areas of the game. If I manage to get the conversion done I will merge it into the existing project and go forward from there. Since it does not make a lot of sense to work on zombies before the conversion is complete I will delay that until after the conversion. Instead I will be working on smaller parts that don’t affect merging such as the improvement for biome distribution. Conversion will also require me to replace the current weather asset I am using because the existing one is not compatible with the new render pipeline. I already found and purchased a suitable replacement which will require a bit of additional work to get fully integrated with my other systems. I don’t expect to get the conversion done within a week because I have never done this procedure and really can’t estimate how long this may take. Since the 3D assets I am using are compatible with HDRP and are the part that is most affected by switching render pipelines I hope that I won’t run into any serious issues. I’m pretty excited for this switch because the high definition render pipeline offers some cool new technology I would like to use in the project such as realtime global illumination, much improved lighting and shadowing, volumetric light, better fog and much more.

Notable tasks this week:

• Researched, learned and tested high definition render pipeline (HDRP) for upcoming project conversion and getting access to higher quality visuals

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.