08-29-2017 01:31 PM
08-30-2017 10:30 AM
08-30-2017 04:08 PM
08-31-2017 07:56 PM
Week 11 - Crab King VR
This week was a continuation of last week, and in the beginning I focused on lowering the number of SetPass (draw) calls.
After some great conversations in the OLP Discord chat, I realized that I hadn’t been using the Frame Debugger to the max. I went through all my plants, and disabled Cast Shadows and Receive Shadows. That gave me a small boost in FPS. Next, Tania and Tyrus pointed out (ha) that my point light may have been causing an issue too. Disabling it (and later deleting it) jumped my FPS up to 90 in the editor! Finally, I disabled Realtime Global Illumination and my FPS hit 100 in the editor. Instead of using the point light to make my characters look brighter, I just turned up the intensity of the directional light from 1 to 1.3. Unfortunately, all this optimization still resulted in about 30 FPS on the device, but at least it was an improvement. Currently my FPS is about 130 in the editor.
My draw calls were down to 20–30, which is great, but my tris were still extremely high (around 447,000). Tyrus suggested using Blender’s decimate functionality, so I decided to look into it. I don’t have very good 3D modeling skills (or a lot of time) so I decided to make an investment and buy the Automatic LOD asset from the store. The asset also comes with the Mesh Simplify tool, which helps developers reduce the vertex count of their models in the Unity editor.
Mesh Simplify seems to be the tool I needed. After a few hours of messing around with it (my first run took about 8 hours just to save), I started to get the hang of it. I reduced my tris down to 70–80K which was great news. Then I tried to replicate this in other scenes. Surprise, I had forgotten to check “Enable Prefab Usage” on the Mesh Simplify script, so I had to go back and check it. This process seems to take several hours to finish. I ended up canceling and just copy-pasting the environment to the other scenes. My FPS ended up at 60!
I also decided to try and add some finishing touches to my demo this week because the end of the program is coming up and I wanted to add some Post Processing and other effects. I imported the Unity Post Processing Stack and it was really easy to use. I made a profile that includes Color Grading and Vignette, and assigned it to all my cameras. That gave the objects’ colors a more unified feel (since they had all come from different sources), and added a slight dark ring around the edge of the screen. That should come in handy when it comes to not making people sick since my frame rate is a little low at the moment. Unfortunately for me, Post Processing is not good for mobile VR, so I disabled it.
Next week, I hope to focus on my proposal and budget.
09-01-2017 08:39 AM
Weekly Blog Post Sept 3rd
Project: Zodiac Circus
I am posting early, so I can focus on finishing and the job ahead.09-01-2017 12:50 PM
09-01-2017 01:01 PM
Dev Blog 11
So we are getting down to the wire with Oculus Launchpad submissions. I’m really worried about getting my app built and working in time. I have finalized the video assets, but I’m still having lots of trouble integrating them into video players in Unity. It takes so long for them to upload, then I need to transcode them, then for some reason the audio seems to be dropping out of the build. The good news in that we finally got gaze interaction working on the board scene, but we ran into issues there too and it took way longer and some crazy workaround to get it functioning properly. We have all the components of the app coming together, but now it’s all about getting the Unity project to work and create a build to submit. I’m planning to spend all of next week troubleshooting this, but it’s really stressful timing because I just started teaching at Emerson College, and I’m moving apartments on Thursday.... I’m doing my best to get this done, but it’s so much more complicated than I originally thought it would be and we’ve run into a ton of bugs and issues that slowed us down. I just hope I can submit something presentable because I worked so hard to get things to this point. 😕
09-01-2017 01:44 PM
09-01-2017 04:46 PM
09-02-2017 04:02 AM
Final stretch! The project is almost done. Just putting all the assets together and adding the final touches! Super excited to be nearing the finish line.
Since this week is a long weekend thanks to labor day I have some extra time off from school to work on the project. My teammates and I will be using this time to work to finish the project this weekend so that we’ll have a week to playtest and debug. Hoping that everything can be done by this Monday. Very stressed at the moment, but if we achieve our Monday goal I’ll be able to calm down a bit. Deadlines are always very stressful.
Looking forward to completing this project and checking out what everyone else has been up to!