In the wake of Ubisoft and other publishers/game makers, making AAA Titles Online only functionality is predatory behavior, learn more here ReadMore
Furr-Tec Studio’s Commitment to game preservation and Online functionality.
I. We at Furr-Tec Studio would like to share some insights on what we plan to do to preserve our game and any future games we release.
II. All server functionality can be locally hosted via a server manager (anti-extinction headless mode)
III. We will provide docker containers to host an online server, meaning if we ever shut down online server hosting due to the rising cost of infrastructure, the game will be able to still work for the MMO part, not just single-player, we will make these changes early on in development so you can rest assure Anti-Extinction remains working no matter what.
IV. We will release patches to address bugs we didn’t detect from testing, so rest assured patching of game code will remain a priority
V. Since the start of development, the scalability of servers shouldn’t be an issue, thanks to DOTS Technology we should be able to make this run on older-gen CPUs preserving them a bit longer, (Anti-Extinction Headless Mode | Server Mode basically)
Now that, that is all taken care of, let's discuss what’s new, changed, etc.
A.C.E. (Ather Chaos Engine)
We introduced a new version of Unity, this is 2023.3.0a18 (a referring to Alpha), this has a bunch of upcoming features and QoL updates for us developers with the approaching Unity 6 LTS.
We added support and implemented NVIDIA DLSS 3, and AMD FSR 2. We also enabled a feature in Unity introduced in 2023.3.X called Batch Render Group API, which does some pretty neat stuff (this lets us perform customizable high-performance rendering).
As of right now this isn’t active *Batch Render Group* we need to do a bit more testing before we are comfortable enabling this for everyone, but it’s there! We are working on it, so it’s only a matter of time before A.C.R. gets this coded in for our Rendering, then it’s game time :3
Along with those NVIDIA/AMD Upscaling technologies we enabled STP (Scalable Temporal Post-Processing)
What’s STP?
• Scalable Temporal Post-Processing (STP) uses spatial and temporal up-sampling techniques to produce a high-quality, anti-aliased image.
• Similar to the TAA Upscale filter, you can only use STP with the TAA anti-aliasing method. It is not compatible with other anti-aliasing methods. It also runs when you set HDRP or URP to use a 100% scale to perform anti-aliasing.
• A limitation to using STP, is that it cannot support dynamic resolution without hardware support. You can still use it for fixed-resolution scaling in cases where hardware support is unavailable. However, the resolution scale value must be forced to a fixed percentage.
New Features Additions:
• Maw Dynamics, full-fledged chaos physics for world destruction
• Le Goob: we renamed it from Ardy Quadrium Interconnect, a multiplayer solution powered by DOTS Technology!
• Small mesh culling: a new feature in Unity 2023.3.X (This is basically inserting an automatic LOD group so that when the object is below a certain screen percentage size it will be culled)
• GPU Resident Drawer: In the latest 2023.3 alpha, Unity has added a new rendering system which is called the GPU Resident Drawer. This is a ‘behind the curtain’, GPU driven, system that allows us to author game objects and when processed they will be ingested and rendered via a special fast path that handles better instancing
The GPU resident drawer is supported on the modern rendering backends within Unity - specifically anywhere compute shaders are enabled this functionality should work. When you are running on a platform that does not meet the required hardware capabilities the rendering will fall back to the traditional, non-GPU, pathway
You can learn more here about what’s new in Unity 2023.3.X https://forum.unity.com/threads/gpu-driven-rendering-in-unity.1502702/