I have worked on making things a bit more prettier. Previously there has been mostly only placeholder effects but now I began planning on what the visual effects and such should look like. I learned to use GIMP to make my own textures, Blender to make some basic meshes and started using Amplify Shader Editor to quickly make some custom shaders. Some of the results can be seen in the following video in the form of beams, projectiles and shield hit effects. (I have also been working on shields, armor, hull, weapon types and damage system but I’ll have to make a post about that later.) I also looked at things like draw calls in Unity to check what optimizations to do and made sure that GPU instancing is used on projectiles, which wasn’t the case before. That was mainly to just familiarize myself with how Unity handles those things, I’m not focusing on optimizing things yet, just making the basic mechanics work. When I started with the game I decided not to start using Unity’s Data-Oriented Tech Stack (DOTS), because it seems a lot easier to prototype things the old way. If it begins to look like that I will have to use it, I will make the change. But I don’t know if that is even going to be the case. I haven’t even done the most basic optimizations like object pooling – all projectiles and effects are instantiated and destroyed as needed and things still work ok.
Anyway, here you can see a video of four battleships attacking a single battleship with huge weapons. Then fighters and some corvettes join the fight to attack the battleships. Even though (or because) the battleships have the biggest weapons there is, they are no match against a big amount of small ships. The battleships would need many smaller turrets to efficiently match that amount of fighters. The video also has music from a composer I’m now working with.
YrdVaab 