I’m trying to post something on this blog every one or two weeks, so since it’s Friday afternoon and I’m feeling too worn out to say anything interesting, I thought I’d just update you on my “progress” this week.
The new website mostly seems to work, so I think I can leave that to its own devices for a while and start trying to put a new software build together. There are various things to do in order to make that happen, including rewriting the code that validates users, now that we have a membership site. But first I’m working on updating from version 2022 of the Unity engine to version 6.
The fact that this one is called Unity 6 and not Unity 2023, probably indicates how embarrassed Unity feels about releasing their shiny new 2023 version almost at the end of 2024! I share their pain…
From my perspective, major version updates of Unity are always really stressful and frustrating, but I have to keep up with them. This one hasn’t go too badly so far, apart from a significant bug in the physics engine. I reported it but they insist it’s too hard to change and so they’re not going to fix it. Which is a bit odd, given that it’s a regression bug and it worked just fine in the last few versions. But luckily I’ve found a way to work around it.
So far, though, I’ve been unable to get the damn thing to compile a build. Mysterious errors that nobody seems to have seen before. I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure. Usually it takes a while for third-party asset developers to iron out the bugs in their own code, so we’re all frantically trying to get our acts together at the same time. You may have to wait for some of them to catch up.
Meanwhile, Unity 6 has some really nice improvements that should make rendering significantly faster and allow things to run okay on lower-end hardware (upscaling, for instance). My first experiments showed no improvement whatsoever, but that’s not too surprising. HDRP has a gazillion settings that interfere with each other in weird ways, so I expect there’s something lurking in a dark corner somewhere that’s preventing the massive improvement in frame rates we were promised. As always, I’ll figure it out eventually.
Once I do get it to build, I’ll write the new validation code and tidy up a few things. That will be a good point at which to allow newcomers who want to get their hands on it, to sign up as paying members, and then, finally, we’ll be truckin’! Don’t expect miracles in this next build, because there’s still almost nothing for you or the creatures to interact with, which makes it all seem pretty boring and pointless. But that’s next on my list of things to do!
For now, I think I deserve a beer… Have a nice weekend!
Oh, wait, I knew there was something: We’ve started having our usual extended and somewhat random conversations in the comments to blog posts, in the absence of any other options. There’s something to be said for that – at least the post provides something to talk about. But it’s not necessarily ideal? It’s not a very chatty format, compared to something like Discord, and yet both blog comments and Discord make topics from previous discussions quite hard to find, compared to a forum. I’d be interested to know what you all feel about the best ways for us to communicate. Any ideas are welcome …er…. in the comments to this blog post!
wpDiscuz
