Devlog - September 11th 2022

HDRP settings for improved visuals

This week’s focus was on getting all the settings for the pipeline in order to get to the visuals I would like to have with the new pipeline. This took a lot more additional testing of the various features (mostly shadows and post processing) than I expected. The performance impact is even a little more than I had last week. This is a little bit of a concern because I would have liked to have a little more of a buffer than I ultimately have now. To potentially counteract this increased performance impact I’ll be looking into the dynamic resolution features that are only available in the HDRP. Those include NVIDIA’s DLSS and also AMD’s FidelityFX technologies. I’ll be looking into those a little starting next week but won’t put too much effort into trying to counteract the additional performance impact just yet because in the absolutely worst case switching back to the builtin render pipeline is always a possibility. This would also not take nearly as long as switching to the HDRP. Hopefully this doesn’t need to happen down the road but I can’t rule it out if I can’t hit the performance benchmarks for mid to lower tier hardware after the implementation of the remaining performance heavy systems. For now I will continue as planned doing the remaining HDRP integrations alongside new feature implementations. I’ll be finally doing some additional experiments on the potential workflow for the modular zombies next week as I still haven’t found a good approach to realize all the different zombie aspects without absolutely destroying performance. Fully modular zombies are a massive challenge, in particular with the combination of modding support. This is mostly due to the fact that modded zombies would need to have access to implemented optimization systems just like the zombies provided by me. Otherwise modded zombies could easily render the game unplayable if the performance impact gets too high. Since not all available optimizations can easily be made accessible for modders I need to figure out a good way to achieve both. If that’s not possible I may have to cut on some of the features for the zombies.

Notable tasks this week:

• Finished high definition render pipeline (HDRP) setup for improved graphics

Wishlist on Steam

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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.