Unity Upgrade

TL;DR: I am updating the Unity engine to improve performance, increase stability and squash some long standing bugs.
I'll probably do this after the next Patreon Release.

After talking to hunters on Discord it has become clear that it is time for bug fixes and feature polishing.  I have been spending all my time developing new features and ignoring bugs and stability issues for too long.

The biggest thing I can do in this regard is to increase the version of the Unity engine to 2019.3 from 2018.2.2 to levereage the new features.

Here are the features that really help me get to the next level:

Nested Prefabs

This allows me to better manage core game components as individual prefabs  instead of me loading them one-by-one in code. e.g.  spawn pools, water effects, user input, physics volumes, etc.   

This should result in more stability with starting/loading games.

New Render Pipelines

I have choice of 2 x render pipelines which should allow me to customise how the game is rendered and squeeze out more performance.

Lightmapper

I am using dynamic lighting in order to support day and night time lighting.  This improves gives me a little performance boost. 

PhysX 4.1

This should prevent issues where the player is shunted outside the play zone or falls through the floor into infinity when levels are loaded.

Editor UI

This will help me when testing the game in th engine and extending my custom tools.

Input System

This package allows me to more easily support gamepads.

Cinemachine

I intend to rewrite all of the game cameras and introduce cutscenes with this.

In Closing

I'm not going to lie.  This is going to hurt me.  It takes time to update the engine and verify that the game still works with my code and other dependancy packages.
It can take weeks to deal with subtle bugs and weird behaviours that creep in.

I'll most likely tackle this after the next Patreon Release.

Until next time, hunter