Devlog - January 22nd 2023

New computer & projects are up and running

This week’s focus was on getting the software installed and set up to continue developing as well as getting the Unity projects for the game up and running. This went pretty smooth and I now also have all the major projects for the game setup including the cloud repositories for them. With that done I started to work on the new main project for the game. The new main project is something I decided to do when I bought the new computer at the end of last year. There is quite a bit of legacy stuff in the old main project and it got really cluttered over the years. Instead of trying to clean up the existing 30GB+ project and likely still leaving stuff in there that is no longer needed I decided it’s best to start a fresh main project and extract the things I need from the old one. This makes sure that in particular old obsolete code won’t end up in the new codebase. This all happened because of the mod system implementation mid development and the new requirements for systems to be compatible with modding. The new computer is the perfect time to do this as I do need to set up the projects on it anyway. In the new project I also updated all the Unity packages to the latest version and realized that the mod system no longer works. After some time I did find a fairly easy fix for it even though I don’t know why it broke in the first place. I’m pretty happy with the progress of this week as it is quite a bit more than I hoped I would get done. I’m really enjoying using the latest version of many programs I use for development. On my old computer updating them frequently caused various issues. With a clean setup it all works incredibly well and I’m making sure that it stays that way by keeping things really organized and up to date. 

Next week I will be working on the new game initialization pipeline to better integrate modding support with it. That also includes creating a new main menu using the new UI Toolkit from Unity I talked about when working on the world generation tech demo for which I first used that new UI system. While the next few weeks will likely not have any fancy stuff to show, things are gonna be going quite fast once I’ve established the better mod system integration with existing systems. This for example means integrating the new version of the character system will go much faster. For a project as big as this one it’s very important to make future maintenance and extendability easy. The multi-project setup I started implementing when I created the mod system will make sure that is the case because most systems will have their own Unity project, making iteration and maintenance and even replacement very easy thanks to much less dependencies. Especially large Unity projects get slower and slower as more files need to be refreshed after certain actions in the editor. Having large systems such as the weather system located in their own projects ensures only relevant systems are actually present when working on anything. Only if I really work on the weather system I need to open that project and don’t have to deal with it when working on the main project. The main project will be quite lean only containing systems like the modding system, saving & loading etc. I’m gonna be doing the reimplementation of systems one at a time, so once the new foundation for the game initialization is done I will probably have at least one if not more new/old system(s) integrated each week that I can highlight and talk about in more detail.

Notable tasks this week:

• Finished new computer setup with all relevant programs
• Setup game projects and respective cloud repositories
• Fix modding system with new addressables version

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

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.