I am taking the next few weeks to recreate an old game for halloween called cursed slots. I need some income to excuse the price of developing Mission Europa. It will only cost a few weeks and also give me experience deploying on Unity prior to the big boy Mission Europa 2. Good stuff Ill post here as I go. Some posts tomorrow of the look it should be pretty fun and a good diversion.
Just about done even though it does not look like it.
3 pass capable shader.
Then Fixed
The shader is really close. I need to figure out where there is a miscalculation. But I think I have a winning solution finally to get around unity’s TERRIBLE lightmapping solution. And the shader should run MUCH better then the shaders Unity has on and for mobile devices.
Back to the show.
I still need to get specular working in the shader I wrote to implement the lightmapping I need.
The plan is to write a shader that uses light maps for lighting but specular is calculated from real time lights in the scene. This way I can enormously reduce the lighting time for levels. Have a much better looking lighting setup and keep the rooms in prefabs. Currently lightmapping is locked to the scene. On issue I may have is the size of my models as they are large and you are only fed the lights that are closest. Well tonight is the experimenting time!….
Why?
Unity is the slowest lighting system I have EVER encountered…. I wrote empirical renders 20 years ago that were faster. Even giving them 20 GIGS of cache space it is still slow as heck. Iterations take DAYS….so I am looking into blender for light mapping. So far so good. Tonight I plan on working towards finding the best way to implement in Unity. I really want my original design back of the game being made by the computer. Unity’s horrible lighting integration does not allow for many things especially generated levels. What I need is simple. A prefab with a lightmap texture and textures for materials separately (I May end up writing my own shader in the end but we shall see) that I can pull from the library. Anyway… as I learn if this will work or not I will post =).
I wanted to add Blenders light maps are WAY better and take minutes not DAYS! I am serious one rendering session took 2 days in unity!…. That does not work with 40 levels x 2 days lol… so broken… I wish I could use Unreal 4 but my Mac is to old at home and Unreal to slow. Maybe next game I will upgrade.
Blender:
Hacked into unity using a standard shader for now… I am going to have to write my own the way I serialize levels.
Looks great to me and looks like a great direction to get back on track!… AND IT TOOK 1 MINUTE TO RENDER LIGHTING UNITY!…. Unity takes overnight for anything even close…… they better get their act in gear….
Well Looks Like I will stick with free unity version. I only lose a few tools I like. Unreal editor cannot run on my older mac at all thus I will stick with unity until I can afford a better laptop =)… In fact even on my beast PC it runs a lot slower then I like. Ok back to it… still recouping where the heck ME 2 stands….
And possibly a big change. Unity has increased its pricing from 75 a seat to 125 a seat. I have run into many road blocks using unity and their enlighten lighting package is absurdly slow and just crap really. They see this also as they are creating a new light mapping solution. However, 125 a seat for the product they offer is ridiculous. Thus I am going to spend a few days exploring the current unreal engine. I will transfer assets and recode lots of items….. but I cannot afford 125 a month for unity. The basic free unity package is hobbled…. I think they are making a huge mistake in direction. We shall see and I will start investigating The Unreal engine tonight. I will post here my findings….
I worked extensively in the past with the unreal engine so lets hope it has gotten better also. In fact I implemented an in engine light-mapper for 2015 back in the day. Back then the engine seemed to have lots of bandaids to make it do things it was not designed for….
More later…..excited to check out unreal…..
I am reworking the way items process actions that way I really open up the possibilities.
Ill hopefully be posting more eye candy soon as I am finally able to get back to ME2 production…
Just lots to get done in life and with the game… =)
Cut scenes are so much easier in Unity!
Design doc needs to be finalized so I can just fill in the missions by a arcing guide.. so no screens today. =)
I can create missions in minutes =)…. good stuff… here was the apparition in game from earlier
Working on some characters as I build the story =).
Easily drop in new nodes and attach for each stage of the mission. Very nice.. and works right away with my story manager
So much easier to tie in missions!…Does not look like much but I can VERY quickly edit a mission chain to create them with lego block type activities… very nice and only took about 2 hours to rig up. Good stuff
Mission Europa 2 Website