Category: Quickie

Smooth Terrain Testing

Smooth Terrain Testing

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Talking to a player of the game, he gave me the feedback that he didn’t quite enjoy the landscaping because the current terrain system looked a bit too unrealistic. Plus the looks of it looked a bit odd depending on the lighting conditions: the light would reflect too strong in certain areas, not strong enough in others.

So I went ahead an prototyped a simple replacement for it. Basically, I added a Terrain object to the game, and am using the existing systems for processing the information, while setting the height of the terrain based on it.

The results are here:

terraintest

I quite appreciate the smoothness of this terrain. With the proper texturing, it could look pretty sweet and clean. I’m studying how to apply the terrain textures to it (grass, gree, fairway etc), but since this has a decent support for normal maps too, it could add some much welcome depth to the terrain features.

It is, however, a trick. The mesh is still pretty much the same as it was before (at least at this stage), and you can see the difference when I turn on the wireframe mapping and some zones:

smooth_editing

But the smooth shadow makes it look a lot nicer. Playing around with some height limitations, I could make the height tools affect nearby vertices as well, to give a smoother climb. There’s no performance loss either at this stage, which is great.

I’m gonna prototype how to apply the terrain textures to it, but I have a hunch it would allow me to more easily use higher-res tiles. And for the zones, I can just keep the current system as they work decently enough as an overlay.

Considering some changes to the planning aspect of it too, but that’s for later!

That’s all for this microupdate!

-Gus

Quickie: More decoration!

Quickie: More decoration!

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

Progress this weekend has been slower than I had anticipated. Finished integrating the UI for the old controls, but still working on the stroke maker. Struggling as well brainstorming the way to integrate it into regular gameplay.

Also spent some time thinking about how to organize the AI system so that I can begin prototyping it. Goal for this month is to have an AI character able to  playtest your course! (probably very poorly, but we all gotta start somewhere!)

So here’s an image of some new trees!

new_Trees

Good thing about this is that the system for adding new decoration prefabs works better than expected! With the added trees, we can begin to see some much nicer looking courses!

That’s all for today, folks!

Expect a proper update soon!

-Gus

Quickie: Prototyping the Stroke Maker

Quickie: Prototyping the Stroke Maker

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hey folks!

I’ve been hard at work this weekend on the new UI system and the new “stroke maker” feature.

Here you can see a nice screenshot of how it is all looking like right now:

shot-prototyping

I’ve also added more icons to replace the placeholder text, as you can see in the top menu. Added a couple new trees for decoration too, which you’ll be seeing more of in the screenshots coming up later.

I think I’ll be able to finish prototyping the stroke maker today, and finish integrating the new UI systems by tomorrow. Since it’s a three day weekend here in Japan, might be able to get the demo updated by monday!

That’s all for now, folks!

Quickie: Anatomy of a Hole

Quickie: Anatomy of a Hole

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello folks!

I’ve finished the work I wanted done for this week. In fact, I’ll be releasing the new demo in a couple of minutes!

Now, the goal of this post is to show you how to play your awesomely create hole.

For that, I created this demo hole: Double Trouble

Here’s an overview of what the hole looks like:

double_trouble

The two little bodies of water in the middle add to the difficulty. The sand trap surrounding it is more for psychological terror, as they’re actually quite flat. Opposite of the fairway, which is angled all over the place, specially aimed to make you fall on the water. So to start off the drive, I aimed my shot in this direction:

stroke_one

My intention was to bypass the slope with speed and make it safely to the end of the fairway. But it actually happened much better! The ball bounced majestically off of the fairway, and ended up really near the green, albeit in a bunker:

stroke_two

From there, though, it was a short chip in to get on the green and be on a good position. This course was a par 4. This shot would put me at 2 strokes, with a potentially straightforward putt to help me to an Birdie. Which is what I did, since my chip in landed around here:

stroke_three

Extremely close. Like, way too close. The kind of close shot I’ve missed before because I forgot to account for slopes and stuff! This time around, I sank it like a champ!

All of this was thanks to a very lucky drive! I was not expecting it to bounce the way it did, but I was very pleased for it!

Well that’s that! Stay tuned for the new demo for Boss Golf!

Quickie: Quality of Life Improvement

Quickie: Quality of Life Improvement

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Heyo folks!

Today I spent some time ironing out a bug with the collision detection, where depending on the speed of the ball it would simply go through the terrain.

That looks fixed enough! Of course, should it happen to you after this weekend’s demo, please let me know!

Still smoothing out the new physics set up. And learning how to play my own game! Turns out sometimes you really don’t want to go full force, as seen below:

Failed_Shot

Or even medium force:

failed_shot_2

Finally, was able to do it!

quality2

Next, I wanna add some trail particles for when the ball is moving on terrain, so that you can more accurately detect the path the ball took. Plus some particle effects to make things look a tad more polished!

That’s all for today’s quickie, folks!

Quickie: Some benchmarking

Quickie: Some benchmarking

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

So just before sleep, decided to do a quick test to see how far I could push the new terrain system.

And well, very far.

The new system can handle a grid of 96 * 96 without any issue. That’s just under 10000 tiles. Of course, them using the same texture and all made it far easier. But still, that’s pretty badass.

jesustenk

Will run more benchmarks over the weekend, but this is very promising.

Quickie: Going Chunky

Quickie: Going Chunky

by Gus Martin ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hey folks,

Today’s update will be a quick one, as the task is still underway.

I decided to do some test to check the performance of the current system if we use larger terrain chunks. So far, all testing had been done on a 16×16 grid, and performance was fine.

So I decided to up the ante to 32 x 32, and the performance was bad…

bad

There was a very notable dip below 60fps, and that’s not good. Not to mention this was just a barren terrain, and that is bad. I’m sure there could be some optimization done, but it still isn’t good enough.

So I decided to redo the tile system again (third time is the charm!), this way separating the terrain into chunks of 16×16 tiles, all contained inside a single mesh. (Chunks can be made up to near 64×64, due to Unity limitations regarding vertices in a mesh). As a test, I spawned 3 chunks of 32×64, and placed it all on the scene. This is roughly 6000 tiles on display, spread across 3 large meshes.

This is the result:

good

As you can see, the performance stayed at 70fps range, render thread was cut by 75%, cpu remained 4ms faster, much smaller number of shadow casters, batches, and a vastly greater number of verts and tris.

So I’ll need some time to adjusting the current system to match this. The generation itself is working fine, as is the UV mapping. But I’ll need to rework the shot system since it’s all under one big mesh collider. Some things will be vastly simplified, though. And the game will run better for it!

Stay tuned for more!