Updates, updates, who’s got the updates?
-Alice in wonderland-
Wow, it’s been a crazy couple of months converting the old Firdrake system to the new version of Unity. Not only have I dramatically updated the dev harness with a pair of new i5 towers, I had to go from Unity 5.2, where I had done all the base programing logic for Firdrake in C#, to Unity 5.6.5 to take advantage the “Single Stereo Pass” rendering mode for Mobile VR that came with Unity 5.5+ upgrade. I didn’t want to go to 2017 yet as I have heard on the forums and chat groups that it is still a bit unstable with some of the VR features and that Unity 5.6 was the best, stablest version to be currently deving for mobile VR on. Since then 2018 has come out. But I am loathed to upgrade to that version in the middle of a project.
Unfortunately, a whole bunch of API and Unity calls that I had been using for the A.I. and general game logic, became depreciated with the upgrade, since the Unity 5.5 update was a major one.. So, I had to spend a considerable amount of time, updating all the C# code to the new API’s. Not a job I was looking forward too, as I am not that strong of C# coder. I much prefer developing environments and experience interactions in Unity, then programing the base code. But alas! It had to be done.
I also had to develop a new way to run the monsters and A.I. as the “legacy animations” I had been using for the monsters, all switched over to Mechian. Lots of learning and trial and error had to be done to get back to a baseline with the entire dev pipeline. However, in the end, the single stereo render mode has made a significant difference on how smooth the game runs. It was worth it in the end, to get that major piece of performance upgrade.
That all being said. I have spent the last three months, about 10 hours a day, completely reworking the first Firedrake experience: The Catacombs of Doom, since I basically had to start over with the new version of Unity And now will have an extremely tight beta version ready in just another week or two of a SIGNIFICANTLY updated experience in both gameplay, looks, added levels, performance and general fun. (it should even run smoothly now on older hardware such as the S6!)
