Posted December 09, 2023 by Mackerel Sky
Hello everybody.
It's been about a month! I think that's a good thing, because it felt like it was ages since 0.05a. Maybe because there has been a lot of work under the hood. More specifically, v0.06a brings a migration to the Universal Render Pipeline, tweaks to the minimap, and a reworked options menu.
Before we get started, if you haven't seen it I had the opportunity for an interview with Skyward Flight, a media website that talks about various flight arcade and simulation games. If you're curious about how ASE got started or my previous work, feel free to check it out. Anyway, let's get into what's new.
Bug Fixes
Known Bugs
New Content and Other Changes
This is a pretty extensive overhaul of the render pipeline, so I hope nothing breaks. There's also a lot more going on visually with the clouds now, which could increase load on the GPU. Operation Magnum Major in particular has turned into my big stress test level with a big map, big clouds, and big fights, which could pose problems for weaker computers. The quality settings I've provided are unfortunately bare-bones, but hopefully they give you the performance boost you need.
Important News
The performance notes I talked about previously hint at a larger development challenge that is coming up. I'm approaching the limits of what my skillset can handle at this current stage in terms of optimisation and map size. ASE is unfortunately only my second project, and I wouldn't call myself an experienced developer at all. There are challenges that I've only just now started to find out about making a flight game in Unity, mainly the need for massive camera draw distances, floating point errors, and terrain optimisation. These are not simple issues I can sit down and fix in a week or so - I expect I'll need to do a lot of heavy research and development over the coming few months to make sure that Unity can handle my minimum expectations for ASE's gameplay.
Of course, this does not mean that I'm giving up. I'm just saying that I will need to work on even bigger upgrades to the engine and game systems in the future to make sure that it can support the scale of even a modestly-sized game map. I'm likely going to start up a private experimental branch of the game to fiddle with and hopefully I can get results within a few months! But I will once again temper expectations and say we'll see how we go.
What's Next?
Even with these challenges coming up, there's still a few more things I can take care of within the current game framework. Namely:
So there'll still be content for a few more patches I reckon.
Thanks for sticking around for the end of the article - please feel free to send any bugs or feedback my way and I hope everybody has a safe and restful holiday break!