This is the first look at what Update 14's new visuals will look like in PunjiVR!
Performance:
This is the main menu scene with medium quality settings and volumetric lighting. Volumetric lighting makes the scene's lighting look like it's actually in the scene by adding things like light beams and dust particles. It does not affect shadows or other lighting visuals, just the "fog" beams that appear in the the 3D space.
It's enabled in the screenshots because it makes everything look a lot better all around, but it does come with a heavy performance cost. I'll look into ways to mitigate this so it can be enabled on all quality settings, but it may just be left as an option for those with beefier systems and hardware. I'll share screenshots later with it off once I polish it up a bit.
Outside of that, performance hasn't really been affected at all, it actually has been slightly improved in some areas. Everything is baked (calculated in editor then drawn on) so that there are no realtime lights or shadows. The new artistic textures/materials don't take any runtime performance cost either.
One thing to note is that this update will be much bigger than previous updates, so expect a decently large file size increase. There are still a few things that I need to tweak, but I'll try to get a video of me playing and showing it off better in VR.
Notes & Other Details:
As you can see, a pastel/painted texture has been applied to all materials, lighting & shadows have been baked into the scene, models have been remade to better fit the style, and more detail was added to make the hilltop base feel less empty.
I forgot to take a screenshot of it, but the barrack interiors feel really nice. The shadows are realistically dark and it feels like you stepped in a closed space from the brighter outside world. It's hard to explain, but this makes me have really high hopes for Streets which is an urban map.
Speaking of shadows, everything is pretty dark, which is actually what I wanted. I'll tweak the AI detection with this update too, but I imagine firefights will be super intense after this update. I can picture some scenes where you're in a chaotic shootout at night and don't know where the enemies are, so you have to lookout for their silhouettes and muzzle flashes (which will illuminate the area).
It's all very exciting and I hope you all feel the same, too. Thanks for reading and make sure to let me know what you think!