Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone!

This week's development update is a day behind the usual Monday Schedule, but we wanted to let people cook some extra content. Today is Team World turn to share their work from the previous three weeks. Let's get started!

Optimisation and Asset Update~

This week we spend most time looking at performance and further tweaking. We will spare you the details but to make it short: Nanite hates masked materials and loves full geometry. This has lead into us having to look at our assets at closer detail and scrap some of them that dependent a lot on masked materials.

So we looked at assets for that and long story short... the pines are gone. The pine forest that we had proved to be incompatible with Nanite, meaning that we unfortunately had come to a dead end. We would have to make our own pine forest assets in order to make things work, assets which we at this time and moment do not have.

The "now former pine forest" map does not go to waste however! Noa has gone and removed the pines and replaced them with far more performance friendly assets that are compatible with Nanite (better optimised). We are going to re-use the map essentially. That way nothing is completely scrapped. The map now looks vastly differenet (except the landscape of course). This is purely to offer the best performance and for that Noa would sacrifice pines all day.

So what DOES the test map look like now?

So here is the current state: the map at the moment only has a wetlands biome available. The assets that we had used for wetlands previously proved to be one of the handful of assets that were still capable of fitting into the performance requirements.

Do not worry, we do not plan on making the entire map into wetlands. For reference the lowest point(s) of the map are going to be wetlands. Nothing above the ground level (or lines featured in below image) will receive that biome either. Which makes it look very empty at the moment BUT we have witnessed better performance already!

There are still some issues popping up so we are working on it.

TL;DR: we have learned lots of things through experimenting and testing what works. That is all part of game development progress, sometimes you simply run into dead ends and have to learn alternatives and adapt into situations. Lots of tweaking and replacing and we are slowly getting there.

• Noa's shoutout to SadEch for being a part of Team World for a huge while. 🤝

SadEch is joining the world creation team for a moment to help optimise some of the human structure assets that we will be using in the monuments and placeholders for player buildings in the future.

NEW! Human Structure Assets + Enter SadEch!

To add on to Noa's bit: our SadEch is joining Team World for a little while, working on optimisation of all our assets. Which means, to take the current assets of building parts (walls, floors, roofs, pillars, and everything else) and manually making them into a high fidelity nanite-friendly asset.

Here's just some of the assets SadEch has to convert manually, to a much higher triangle count than they are currently. It will take time, but the results will be a lot better than they are currently. In the long run, it will be performance enhancing and thus it's worth the time to convert existing bought assets, into more customised, nanite-ready objects.

But that's everything this week , not as large as normal however it is very important to do -!