Sup guys
This is a bit negative, but it's better to rip off the band aid quickly and move on.
I have started to come across a lot of problems with regards to how the new project is shaping up performance wise. To put it lightly; Unity's HDRP is super dissapointing.
Engine Troubles
The performance hiccups started to pop up when I began planning out the combat encounters for each Train compartment. Before that the game would run at a locked 60 FPS and even over that on the maxed out quality settings, even with all the amount of props on-screen.
I wrote a few systems to improve performance even more, such as culling objects, rooms and lights when the player moves out of their range. This also doubled the frames, so everything was going pretty good all things considered.
But something about having more than one AI character moving around on screen just killed performance every time. I even tested this in an empty scene, and got the same stutters and dropped frames. For context, the AI isn't any more complex than the ones in the original CARNAL, only differences being they can strafe walk and show expressions on their faces now.
To make sure I wasn't crazy I even opened a few older projects with basic AI and simple scenes into the new engine and experienced the same problems. These older projects would run at 400-500 FPS when using the Built-in Unity renderer, but once I opened them in HDRP, they would drop to 20-30 FPS. If I had to guess, it would appear that HDRP has a bottleneck somewhere with regards to skinned meshes and animations, even more so if there are multiple agents on-screen animating at the same time, regardless of model complexity.
That's a huge problem, especially if you're trying to make a fast-paced shooter with multiple enemies on-screen.
HDRP is an amazing tool, don't get me wrong. But after countless tests and optimizations I cannot get the project to run at a locked 60 FPS in all scenarios. The in-game models are equivalent to 2010 era games and the AI code is comparable to 2001 era games. The only new thing is the modern lighting engine used in HDRP, which makes it look as good as it does. For reference I am using an AMD RX 6600, Ryzen 5 5600X, 16GB RAM and Nvme 2 solid state drive, so it's not the PC either.
HDRP has been in an experimental phase since 2018, and even though the performance has improved over the years, it simply still isn't ready for making fast-paced shooters. I think I now know why AAA developers don't use HDRP for new games. For as much as i don't care about Unreal Engine, I can see why it remains the go-to choice for the majority of developers, as Unity is just too far behind in terms of visuals vs performance. Also Unity as a company are slow to make improvements on their software, whereas Epic runs circles around them.
So What Now?
I am going to have to put this project on the back burner for a while, at least until Unity can sort their mess out. I am not trashing the project or the idea, but it's pointless to continue. I have been in a bit of a negative space because of this, seeing as I've sunk a ton of hours into this project, only to find out that the toolset cannot deliver on it's promises. You would need a super beefy PC to run this thing at a locked 60FPS, which is unrealistic, as I cannot expect everyone that plays this to have an RTX 3090 type PC. I am not going to downgrade the vision I had for the game, as that would defeat the purpose.
The whole situation sucks.
Wanna know what sucks even more? Most people didn't seem to care about the new high quality visuals either. I had more people tell me they prefered the look of the original CARNAL to the new one. So technically I was making a game no one really wanted too lol
You Got Anything Else?
I don't really know what to do now exactly. I have dug out the old PAGAN project from an external drive, but I'm not sure I people would be okay with that after seeing what I was trying to do with the new CARNAL. Also it would probably look like a schizophrenic development process.
Would a large scale combat game like this still be okay for you guys? I can genuinely understand if it's not. I originally stopped on it when both of my previous graphics cards died on the old PC, then I just never went back to it. I recorded a few minutes last night of what the PAGAN project was before I shelved it:
Watch on YouTube
Here is what my plans for it were:
https://mercysoft.itch.io/pagan
I guess when all those nerds said "making games is hard", they were kinda serious.
Feels like I should get a different hobby sometimes XD