Devlog - February 26th 2023

Mod selection menu & realtime global illumination testing

This week’s focus was mostly on more work for the mod menu and UI Toolkit as well as some testing on realtime global illumination options.

During the recent Unity sale I came across a rather new asset for realtime global illumination designed for the high definition render pipeline. Since the global illumination option provided by default with the render pipeline doesn’t quite hit the quality level I am aiming for I decided to buy that asset and give it some testing. The results are significantly better at about the same performance cost. Realtime global illumination is quite resource intensive which is why it’s usually provided as an option to enable on high end devices. The same will of course be the case for my game as well and I’ll be adding it to the upcoming options menu. I will see if I can provide the realtime global illumination as a standalone mod too so it can potentially be replaced with a different algorithm if required/desired.

Most of the remaining time this week went into further improvements on the mod system itself and the mod selection menu for it. For that I started creating a reusable tab menu so I can split the selection of active mods from the mod order. What the player will essentially do is select which mods should be active and afterwards select the mod order of those active mods. In many cases the mod order will not be relevant but in the case of dependencies it’s possible this way to ensure a specific mod is loaded before another one. This for example also enables dependencies of a mod based on other mods. Finally I spend way too much time trying to get background blur implemented for UI Toolkit. Since the system does not natively support shaders or materials it’s something that’s much more difficult than in the old UI system. I’ve seen other people achieve it with some workarounds. Unfortunately I’ve not had much luck getting it to work for me. As it’s not required to have at this point during development I will be moving that task into the future. Knowing it’s possible as others have done it I’m not worried I will get it to work when it’s required to. Maybe at the time I actually need it there is additional support added to UI Toolkit making this easier too. Spending too much time on a workaround right now is time not invested well so I’m not going to. Next week I’m aiming to finish the mod selection menu so I can showcase it in the next devlog and also the upcoming steam progress report. After that more menus as well as getting the game start process completed will be my main priorities.

Notable tasks this week:

• Tested new realtime global illumination asset
• Created reusable tab menu for UI Toolkit
• Further extended mod system and mod selection menu

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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.