Happy Monday everyone ✈️
We are reviving the Flight Log series today, and planning on bringing them to you more frequently!
In today’s development update we wanted to talk a little bit about Unity and why we chose to stick with this engine as this seemed to be a common question with our announcement. We’ll also have a few images to share of some retextured High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) plane renders.
Why did we choose this engine / version for Deadstick?
We chose to stay with Unity so we could build on the work already done by Chris and his team and it gave us a good head start on development.
We upgraded to the latest version of Unity to take advantage of HDRP. This offers many visual improvements over URP (Universal Render Pipeline) or the previously used render pipeline. Unity released this spotlight video to showcase the capabilities of HDRP.
Disclaimer: This video is used for informational purposes only. All rights belong to the original creator.
Advanced physically based surfaces
HDRP gives us a much better graphic quality and greater fidelity of surface textures and materials across the board. We are able to use advanced shaders with customisable subsurface scattering, translucency, iridescence, anisotropy and real time tessellation and provide Deadstick at a much higher graphical standard.
Immersive Lighting
HDRP uses correct physical light sources with much greater control over the lighting including the light types, shadow options, light exposure and control, light baking, ray marching and ray tracing and reflections, global illumination, volumetric lighting, that's not to say we will use all of this everywhere, but it gives us more options with greater quality.
Spectacular Atmosphere
All of the HDRP tools and rendering options allow for some procedural skies, volumetric fog, volumetric clouds and weather, all adding to the atmosphere of flying an aircraft in near realistic conditions and providing the player with a fully immersive flying experience.
Maximise Platform Performance
Using HDRP we are able to maximise performance by utilising the Burst and Job system and upsampling algorithms such as NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR.
Example Retextured HDRP Plane Renders
Please note that images and videos shown are not representative of the final visuals, all are work in progress while we work on development.
Thanks for reading all, and we’ll be back with another developer update soon.
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- Mythwright