Hello survivors,
Welcome to the monthly progress report covering the major aspects I worked on in September 2022. As always, if you do prefer bullet points and not read everything in detail you can skip the sections after the TL;DR part.
TL;DR:
- More tweaks to high definition render pipeline (HDRP) setup
- Researched and planned upcoming zombie implementation using UMA (Unity Multipurpose Avatar)
- Researched new asset to improve world generation
- Took about a 2 week break due to covid
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General
I started off the month by doing more tweaks to the high definition render pipeline settings along with a lot of testing to make sure to stay within the performance requirements. There are a couple more systems left to be updated to HDRP before I can integrate them back into the game, most importantly the terrain shading. This will be worked on in October to hopefully get everything fully working as before. For that reason I am currently still using the default Unity terrain shader in the screenshots of this progress update. Unfortunately I got Covid and while I never had a fever or felt too bad I decided to take it slow and take a break from development for about 2 weeks. This means development time this month was significantly less than I planned for.
Zombie Research & Planning
Most of my time this month went into researching, testing and planning the upcoming zombie implementation. For that I explored various approaches before finally coming back to an asset called UMA. This asset is freely available and offers the necessary versatility I need to create modular zombies. During research of the asset I discovered that 7 Days To Die also makes use of that asset for their zombies which further strengthens my believe that it is possible to achieve modular zombies with modding support using UMA. The nature of it being free allows me to add modding support for zombies much easier because I don’t have to deal with licensing or copyright which would be the case for alternative approaches. The asset does come with a set of human models which I will be basing the zombies on to also make it easier for modders to add contents to the zombies like custom clothing models. Since the human models are of course not really looking like zombies I will be doing initial retexturing of the skin, applying blood platter and possibly some wound overlays in combination with custom facial expressions and of course animations to make them look and feel more like zombies. Once the zombies are implemented on a technical level and I can be sure to stick to this asset and models I will commission a professional character artist to do the necessary changes to give the zombies the quality I am looking for. Waiting for that gives me the option to still decide on whether or not I think fully custom 3D models are required and if need be commission them instead. Unfortunately due to my covid break and the required thorough planning for the zombie implementation to meet all its requirements there was not much time for anything else this month.
Plans for October
Since the zombie implementation is a huge task I will not solely focus on it for October. Unexpectedly the creator of the terrain shader I am soon going to be implementing back into the game just released a new asset for environment creation. I already spent a bit of time looking into the asset to see if it would help me with certain tasks in my world generation pipeline. From what I can tell it should fit nicely into my pipeline and even potentially allow me to skip certain implementations I had planned for in the future. However, this integration won’t be a quick one as it would require me to step away from my current vegetation placement and rendering asset. While this may sound bad it’s actually a good thing because the current asset for that has not received any updates in a long time and may break in future Unity versions. With the uncertainty of the future of that asset I currently rely on and the absence of the developer of said asset I think it’s well worth the time to try and switch to another vegetation rendering system and utilize the new asset to manage vegetation placement. I’ve already found a potential replacement for the new vegetation rendering too and will be looking into that a bit in October. Ultimately I think this switch could prevent running into serious issues later in development and save me time in the long run by taking the step now while it’s much easier to do than later. I will be doing a good amount of tests before making any final decisions but that is certainly where some of my time in October will be allocated for.
I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts, feedback or criticism in the Steam discussions.
That’s it for this update post. I hope you are all doing well.
Stay safe out there and I’ll see you in the next one.
Norman aka CitrioN
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