TRANSLIMINAL - FOUNDATION III - The Rendering Update

Transliminal: Beyond The Backrooms now runs on Unity's Universal Render Pipeline.

The game renders at your display's true native resolution. Pool water is a real simulation that moves when you walk through it. The camcorder pulls its own focus. There are also six new graphical presets that control the myriad new graphics settings at your disposal.

Every custom shader in the game was rebuilt for the new pipeline, from the pool water to the VHS Effects. Hundreds of materials were converted with them.

The Unity engine renderer the previous version of the game used is being retired, and no new features will be added to it. If I wanted Transliminal to use the best current-gen rendering, an upgrade to the latest tech was mandatory.

The following changes have been made to Transliminal: Beyond The Backrooms v0.0.9873a:

Additions

• The game has been rebuilt on Unity's Universal Render Pipeline.
• Transliminal now renders at your display's true native resolution.
• New DISPLAY MODE options for Fullscreen, Borderless and Windowed.
• New RENDER SCALE setting with Native, 75%, 60% and Retro 4:3 options. This controls how sharply the world is drawn without changing your window size.
• RETRO is one of those options. It still draws at the same low internal resolution it always did, but it now holds a true 4:3 window on any monitor, ultrawide included, centered in clean black bars with hard pixel edges. Everything else upscales smoothly.
• New antialiasing with sharpening options.
• New GRAPHICS PRESET setting with Very Low, Low, Medium, High, Ultra and Found Footage. Each one sets render scale, antialiasing, shadows, texture detail, water and effects all at once. Found Footage is Retro 4:3 with the camera and VHS effects on.
• New graphics options for ANTI-ALIASING, TEXTURE QUALITY, SHADOW-CASTING LIGHTS, SHADOW DISTANCE and DEPTH OF FIELD. Each antialiasing method has its own settings underneath it.
• The Graphics menu is sorted into Preset, Display, Image Quality, Shadows, World Detail and Camera Effects.
• FRAME RATE LIMIT replaces the old unlock toggle. Pick 30, 60, 90, 120, 144, 165 or 240 FPS, or Unlimited.
• New ASCII FILTER. It is the same text effect you see when you die and come back, now as a filter you can leave on. It has its own settings for character size, brightness, edge threshold and color mode, and edges are drawn in slashes and lines that follow the shape of whatever you are looking at.
• TV FILTER now has its own settings: BLUR, SCANLINES, SCANLINE SIZE, COLOR BLEED and LENS DISTORTION, which applies a barrel curve to the image. The title screen and intro keep their own look.
• Pool water is now a real time simulation that reacts to the player.
• Innertubes now float.
• Water Quality now selects between the full simulation and a lighter effect for weaker machines.
• The camcorder autofocuses now.
• A heavy hit can now knock the camcorder out of Victor's hands, and now and then a lighter one will too. It falls to the floor and Victor picks it back up.
• Picking the camera up after the fall at the start of the game no longer glides smoothly into place. The pickup is now an unsteady, shaking motion that settles into position.
• Every so often a single light will use one of the odd colors on its own, while every other light in the level stays default.
• The elevator now shakes when it falls. It runs through catch, break-loose, rattle and shaft-impact stages during the descent.
• Only the first recipe you find opens the sketchbook now. Every one after that slides a notice in from the side of the screen with the recipe's name, without opening the menu.
• The computers in the Offices can now be used.
• Office computers boot into their own operating system and apps.
• The player may now experience UI hallucination sequences when sanity is low.
• The title screen logo has new animated effects.
• The title screen logo now reacts to the mouse.

Tweaks & Fixes

• Fixed mouse movement being amplified during level loading hangs, causing sudden camera spins.
• The RESOLUTION dropdown now lists every size your monitor reports. It previously filtered to your current aspect ratio, which left ultrawide players with a single option.
• Fog keeps the first few feet around you clear and builds up gradually instead of applying at full density across the whole room. It still fully hides the world at the same distance it always did.
• Lens flares, grass, the Cogwell room clouds, wall stains and streak decals, see-through glass and the Ocean were all rebuilt for the new render pipeline.
• Recreated the Insanity VHS effects in the new render pipeline and rewired them to the player's sanity states.
• The INSANITY VHS NOISE option is now called VIDEO NOISE.
• Loading a save that is still at the very start of the game from the in-game menu now replays the opening fall properly. You could still walk around during the drop, and the falling camera could stay on after it was over.
• Image Brightness now adjusts exposure directly. It previously adjusted a color grading wheel, which is why its response was inconsistent.
• Head Bob and Insanity Sway are applied properly on relaunch. The choices were always saved. The camera and the menu checkboxes just were not reading them back.
• Flashlight brightness corrected. Bright, Medium and Dim are all usable again without blowing out the wall in front of you.
• Getting up from the couch works again. Sit down, walk forward, and you have control back.
• The Async Rover flare now scales with distance the way it should: full size up close, smaller the further away you are.
• The Cogwell title card no longer repeats, and no longer appears in the wrong level.
• An emptied phase gun in CrawlSpace-3 now respawns the room's ultracapacitor so you cannot strand yourself.
• Crawlspace barricade boards phase apart properly when shot with the Phase Emitter.
• Typing a save name with letters that match menu hotkeys no longer opens or closes menus mid-word.
• The red low health effect on the screen now clears properly when you revive. If you had raised your max health above 100 it could stay stuck at full strength for the rest of the run.
• Victor's shadow no longer floats off the floor when you crouch or crawl.
• Loading into the game no longer plays the tape stop sound for no reason.
• The hallway entrances in the Parking Garage use the right wall materials now. They were using the Hospital's.
• Added missing wall colliders to the scale puzzle side rooms in The Pools.
• The pool rooms in The Pools now fade the ambient light to black when you enter them. They previously faded it to full white.
• Fixed a misspelled subtitle on one of the voice lines in The Pools.
• Increased the volume of the hold music on the phone calls.
• Deaths are now counted correctly. An ordinary death was adding two to the Deaths count on your save, while a Smiler kill only added one.
• With AUTO RELOAD off, picking up batteries no longer reloads your flashlight for you, and you can reload a dead flashlight yourself instead of waiting for a pickup to bring it back.
• CHARACTER VOICE now properly saves and restores your preference when you restart the game.
• Running down stairs works properly now. Victor stays grounded the whole way, so Escape opens the regular menu instead of the midair one, and no landing impact triggers on every step.
• Ceiling light panel emission intensity is now determined by the real time intensity of the fixture's light.
• Flickering ceiling panels fade now instead of snapping between lit and dark.
• Flickering and flashing ceiling panels follow the level's light color now. They used to stay plain white while every other light in the room had changed.

Optimization Efforts

• Shadows are now budgeted. Only a limited number of lights cast shadows at once, set by SHADOW-CASTING LIGHTS. Many environments were experiencing poor performance due to too many real time shadow casting lights being active at once. This is the biggest performance improvement the game has ever had.
• Many lights and audio sources that were not pooled now are. This should allow for smoother, more stable frame rates.
• Liquid rendering cost now scales down with distance.
• The electricity and the TV static now animate on the GPU.
• Removed the third party shadow and post processing systems entirely and replaced them with the new pipeline's own.
• Removed purchased shader packages that were still being loaded at runtime.
• Cleared out compile warnings and dead fields across the rendering code.
• Audio files now use proper import settings.
• Removed unused text assets.
• The Phase Emitter no longer creates a brand new impact flare every frame while you fire. It reuses one that follows whatever you are hitting.
• A handful of level scripts would abort when they hit a missing object, leaving the rest of their work undone. In the worst case that left things switched on that should have been off. They now skip the missing object and continue.

Moving to a new pipeline is what makes the real optimization work possible. The old renderer was a ceiling we've finally broken through. Some of that optimization has already landed, and I'm still measuring the rest. If anything runs worse for you than it did before, please let me know.

Now I can get back to filling my Backrooms.

As always, thank you to everyone still wandering around in here with me.

There is a lot more to come.

See you in there, Wanderer.

_-=[ ComAdore ]=-_