Just a small heads-up! This week’s Elemental War update is delayed by one or two weeks.
It has nothing to do with COVID-19. It’s just that it took longer than expected to figure out a solid plan for the performance optimizations. The whole optimization process will be split up in a few different steps.
We already did some performance optimizations for the whole audio processing for 1.6.0. But we want to improve the levels for 1.6.0 now as well. This will already give a small performance boost. Depending on how long it will take we will delay 1.6.0 by one or two weeks. It won’t be more.
The next step is already bigger. We will upgrade to a newer Unity version. That alone won’t bring any performance benefits, but allows us to use some new techniques that will help. There are two things: The Universal Render Pipeline and DOTS.
The Universal Render Pipeline is a new and a lot improved rendering pipeline Unity developed in the last years. We already use it in Tri6: Infinite and it’s pretty cool. A first try with Elemental War gave us around 50% better performance on Xbox One in the benchmark scene, that’s already a lot.
DOTS stands for Data Oriented Technologies Stack and is also a new thing in Unity we also use for Tri6: Infinite. It makes it easier to write more CPU friendly code and use multithreading in Unity. This will mean we have to rewrite some of the functionality of Elemental War, but therefore it will be way more performant afterwards.
So the plan is to release 1.6.0 with the optimizations we can already do now, then we will upgrade Unity and convert to URP which will end up on a new beta branch we will set up for that purpose. While that’s being tested, we will upgrade our code base to DOTS where it makes sense and push these changes to the beta branch as well.
If you have any balancing concerns or bugs, please let us know, either as comment, in the discussions, via the Feedback functionality ingame or on Discord.