2018
Last year was a really crazy year for me I made so much progress (and clearly neglected the website).
I started a new job to pay the bills, but still getting home from work and putting in time on BOV.
Here's a quick run down of some stuff I've been doing for the last year.
Graphics/Performance
One of the biggest hurdles for me has been performance - I've been struggling with this for years, it's been an obsession for me to have a game that is running super smoothly and because this game is going to have a VR mode it has to have SUPER performance.
I finally feel like I've made good progress and on my development machine the game is now running at 120 fps in 4k for non VR mode and in VR mode with 1.6 super sampling which looks incredible - all that whilst still looking gorgeous inside the Unity Editor which makes working on the game a joy. I'm going continue writing optimization tools to achieve an even higher standard of performance.
Level Design
I've made great progress on the first level 'The Town of Grimstead' pictured above. This is my 5th attempt at creating Grimstead and getting the right style and understanding level design has been hard for me it been a lot of trial and error to see what works and what doesn't. I'm finally getting happy with the results and I feel over the last year I've developed the skills to move forward. Just gotta finish Grimstead and design the other 20 levels!
Players
I've also given all the player a refresh, each has been re-modeled and re-textured in 8k, so I've got plenty of detail to work with now. Next step is to implement/redo new game play mechanics for the new players.
Tools
This is where I spent most of my time last year writing tools to make making BOV easier / less time consuming. Every time something takes me more than an hour and I know I'm going to repeat the process, I'll write a new tool to do the job automatically, this has taken a lot of time, but it means I can make more complex tasks and game play much faster not to mention less buggy, they've already saved me 1000's of hours.
Networking
I wrote my own networking system to make doing multiplayer faster, less prone to bugs and less time consuming. So far its working extremely nicely and barely requires any coding - most stuff is handled automatically, I'd like to make some enhanced visual debugging tools next...
That's all for now there's much more, but I'll leave that for another post
L8r - Taz