It has been a few days since the last post and I have been hard at work to researching improvemnts and performance enhancing techniques.
One of the first things that needed a drastic improvement was the framerate. I did not think that updating the project to HDRP would kick the framerate in the groin this hard. From an upper 200fps down to 60 or lower.
To make the framerate more manageable, I needed to implement some form of dynamic asset loading. After some searching I stumbled upon the concept of level streaming and subscene loading and unloading. While i am familiar with the concept from a long time ago, I have never really had the need to implement something like that myself. Since I have never made a game that actually had the graphical fidelity to actually need it.
Okay, so I can cut my levels down to smaller pieces and load them when they are needed, excellent. The first problem was that the wall assets are double-sided. As in that one wall piece could be visible in two rooms. Assigning those pieces to specific scenes to be loaded would cause a problem. The easiest solution would to be just to cut up the walls so that they are only facing one “room” at a time. unfortunately this will result in more wall pieces, but since the one scene is going to be cut up in several more scenes, the increase in assets is not really an issue. Since the prototyping is working quite well, I have yet to convert all the walls to only be half walls. But it is getting there.
While I have separated most of the assets in to new scenes I have not yet made the scrips that will handle the actual loading and unloading yet. I am going to wait with that until the time I have made better assets to populate the scenes with.
I actually am having a good time fixing these problems, although it is quite annoying to tear stuff down and build it up again. I am slowly getting better at it. The asset library is also slowly growing. Progress feels good.
