Hi generals!
February was a veeeery busy month preparing the game to start the first alpha playtest!
NEW VEHICLES
Added the NAFT4 fuel truck and TM-21 Volley
MULTIPLE NAVIGATION MESHES
I worked quite a bit on navigation mesh generation to reduce edge cases that were causing some tiles not to generate, then started generating multiple version of the navigation meshes for different unit sizes (infantry, small vehicles, large vehicles)
NEW DETAILS SYSTEM
Made a new details system and got rid of the previous slow grass system. This new system has tile caching and optimizes updates to keep entities in fixed positions when possible and skipping updates on entire chunks early for super fast performance. The system also works for any details near the camera, not just grass, so I am also able to add a ton of little rocks, debris and other objects when needed. I also replaced all the grass for much fluffier and nicer looking ones.
Of course the game won't have that many little rocks and trash on the roads unless there is a lot of destruction in the area, this video below was just a tech demo of this new system.
NEW UI SYSTEM
Working on UI in Unity was pretty painful and inefficient using the traditional UGUI system, so I decided to try UI Toolkit and OH BOY! That thing is awesome, I can code the UI in a similar way to making a website, work much faster and make it much more flexible and maintainable. So I started migrating most of the existing UI to this new system and adding more (like pause menu, in-game settings, graphics settings, etc)
MIPMAP STREAMING
To prepare for the alpha going to players with all sorts of hardware I looked into GPU memory usage, and realized a long time ago I disabled mip map streaming because it wasn't compatible with Unity DOTS (the system I am using for large worlds performance). So I decided to implement my own mipmaps streaming solution. This means textures load at different resolutions depending on how close or far objects are relative to the camera, saving a ton of GPU memory (VRAM).
VOLUMETRICS
I improved volumetric fog effects so that you can see light shafts when moving around objects (you can see the result of that around the houses in the details system video above).
VEHICLE PHYSICS
Improved vehicle physics to allow them to drift more realistically, which also prevents them from falling over sideways when taking curves too sharply. Also prevented vehicles from drifting downhill over time due to friction calculation precision issues.
STEAM
I got 100 alpha playtest keys, integrated Steam key verification, checked that the game is still playable offline despite the steam verification and added the first TLG achievement, which will allow testing that kind of basic Steam integration stuff during the alpha.
PREPARING THE ALPHA
The first step for the alpha will be testing it with my wife through Steam on her macbook, so this weekend I went back to my 2019 macbook after 2 years and made the game work there again. I need to adjust a few little things (classic macbook cursor size and hotspot issues) but overall it seems to be working (although really slow because that macbook is definitely not for serious gaming). Then I will sign and notarize the app, upload to steam and give her a key to test it! A few weeks after that I will start testing with friends too :) NEW MILESTONES!
And TLG keeps growing! Already hit 110.000 wishlists on Steam, 4.500 members in the Discord (join here!) and 160.000 followers on Youtube! Thank you all for this!! It's way beyond my most optimistic dreams!