drmelon

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gamedev (snolf romhack) 🍉 music 🍉 interactive fiction 🍉 pyjama elemental 🍉 nonbinary pan 🍉 💜 @leafcodes

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@drmelon
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LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

TECHNICAL: Ive spent like the last 2-3 weeks porting Demonschool from the built in renderer to URP - Its been a whole thing!

A big driver behind that (its a MASSIVE change!) is to help increase performance on lower-powered PCs and consoles, so we should get acceptable framerates on Switch and even Intel integrated GPUs now (I'll need to dig up an intel IGPU to test that on though...)

Heres an example of some of the fun issues you can get into when you try to mix 2D sprites with 3D worlds. Before we had SO many custom shaders to deal with depth and stencil writing and ordering hacks to try and get everything almost right. All that is now handled with a few URP Rendering features. Big fan, read more below for more details!

NecrosoftGames
@NecrosoftGames

Since you nerds all liked that work-in-progress-behind-the-scenes-sneak-peek, have another one! Today we ported our character outline shader

✅ Works with the floor stencil system
✅ Draws to the Z buffer for correct VFX layering
✅ Supports outlines (duh)
✅ Supports Alpha Fade & Sprite Tint colours
✅ Supports Alpha Clipping (the glass shards behind Faye and Knute would be weirdly broken otherwise!)
✅ Supports the SRP Batcher

Hopefully all this will help make the game run on your old laptop without too many dropped frames! Why not drop us a wishlist? ❤️

Demonschool

 on Steam

Demonschool is a new-style tactics RPG where motion equals action. Defeat big weirdos in between the human and demon worlds as Faye and her misfit companions, while navigating university life on a mysterious island.
 

Available: 2023

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in reply to @LotteMakesStuff's post:

Cyn-Cedilla
@Cyn-Cedilla

We locked in on BIRP very early on in 1000xRESIST and our solution for lighting on Switch basically wound up being me throwing up my hands and saying "the Switch version will just Look Kinda Bad!" "You get one directional and one point and I'll mesh-and-texture bake the hell out of our environments and characters!"

This post makes me a little wistful for What Could Have Been, but we definitely don't have time to even explore a URP or HDRP conversion at this point. We also do a lot of BIRP multi-camera tricks and I remember that being basically impossible in URP/HDRP last time I tried to use them (which was like, 2019?)

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LotteMakesStuff
@LotteMakesStuff

We locked in on BIRP very early on
Same! Its been on built in for years, and like, there's prototypes stretching back like... 7 years ago or something - so yeah real scary change to commit to but it ended up being not the worst experience.

You get one directional and one point and I'll mesh-and-texture bake the hell out of our environments and characters!

We couldn't do that for two reasons, some of our environments would still run sup 20 fps on target hardware if we allow them to draw twice (!) - we also have a lot of dynamic light animation for things like time of day transitions, so we just can't bake stuff either.

We also do a lot of BIRP multi-camera tricks and I remember that being basically impossible in URP/HDRP last time I tried to use them (which was like, 2019?)

URP does now have comprehensive support for split-screen rendering and camera stacking which works quite well.

But yeah - all in all it was painful, but worth it I think. feel free to email me if you ever feel like biting the bullet and wanna consult on it or something heh. Getting the light attenuation code will probs be a big help for any conversion like this!

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Cyn-Cedilla
@Cyn-Cedilla

lol, at this point we're just cramming 1KXR out the door as fast as possible and then evaluating Unreal as an option for all future projects, so in all likelihood there's no Unity Rendering Pipeline work of any kind in my future. Thanks for the offer, though!

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