For those of you not keeping tabs on the giant discussion thread, I have decided to completely OVERHAUL the way Art of boxing renders it's graphics.
Prior to today, Art of Boxing employed one of the most advanced graphics "Pipelines" known to man. It is capable of really amazing stuff, and for those wondering, it is called the "HDRP pipeline".
It uses some of the most advanced techniques on earth as far as rendering graphics on-screen, and is typically being used to develop for "Next-Gen" systems with advanced shaders, and a bunch of other cool stuff we don't really need.
The capabilities of this engine (in the right hands ,.... uhh cough... ) is incredible, as you can see from one of their official videos of a "CyberPunk"-like city rendered in perfect 3D:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgcU2HBOXAw
I just want people to understand what this update does... some insight into video game development :-P ... sorry for the long pre-amble
SO long story short: HDRP is great, but the main issue is, that it is developed, for 5 years in the future. Because of this fact, very little is supported, and a lot of my time is spent figuring out "How to do <blank> in HDRP". It also totally ignores lower end rigs, laptops, and to a certain extent Mac and Linux in compatibility. This is not Unity's fault - they warn you explicitly before venturing down the "HDRP path" to basically NOT do it. I should have listened!
SO... after far too long, I have "given in" and completely reverted the entire game back to Unity's "Built In" Pipeline. This has 100% support for all types of systems, and is just generally easier to work with.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE GAME?
- First of all, I thought the game would take a major hit in graphics, going back to the standard pipeline. I was PLEASANTLY surprised that the game actually looked BETTER!!? The reason being that a LOT of the materials and textures I used in the game were actually initially built for the Standard Rendering system - and I had converted them over to HDRP myself. This had mixed results depending on the texture... now with the textures rendering in their NATURAL environment - everything just looks cleaner and crisper. There might be some lighting issues and texture problems at first but for the most part the game looks good!
- The game will now run on lower end rigs. I have not tested it thoroughly yet as I don't have access to THAT many computers, but the minimum system requirements should be VASTLY REDUCED. What the actual min reqs are now - we will need to find out!
- The game should now run smoothly on Macintosh computers! There were many issues involving Mac and HDRP.... hopefully those have all been put to bed. The system requirements for Mac have also changed - and Metal shaders are no longer REQUIRED, but are used if available. The game now uses OpenGL so that makes things MUCH better for mac in general.
- CHANGES TO PHYSICS AND COLLISION! You didn't think I was only changing graphics did you>?? A huge realization - that Boxer1's GLOVES would not collide with Boxer2's GLOVES. By checking ONE stupid box, now the gloves can interact with eachother. This actually is HUGE. Now gloves are re-directed if they hit the other persons gloves. This means, that in the past if a players glove was in the way of a punch, the punch went right through the glove and called it a "landed punch" (unless you were actively blocking, in which case the glove would still graphically travel THROUGH the other boxer's gloves but just do no damage.) On this update that is no longer the case. This means that in order to land a "clean" punch - the other boxers gloves cannot be in the way. This in effect means you can now PHYSICALLY block punches without having to actually hit the block button (obviously block button is still block and negates damage based on stamina). Basically it means it is much harder to land punches now.
- Changing the game from HDRP opens up the ability to add tattoos (this will be implemented in the coming weeks) and generally just the ability to ADD MORE to the game without it hurting the performance. Things such as the "1999" crowd (imo 1999 is GENEROUS - those models are AWFUL lol) can be completely replaced and upgraded as well as many other things like the hair!
Thanks for playing my game! Keep the KOs coming!
TLDR: Game is optimized for low end computers. No more lag. More new stuff coming.