Beginning Map Overhaul part 1 (Patreon)

Now that I finished character customization, I am going back to adding behaviors and things to do in the game. This requires a new map because the current map is very old and small. As I said before this new version is huge and is about 16x bigger.

Today I started optimizing the shape of the map. The problem is that when you develop for a platform like VR, you need to take into account the potential performance of every viewpoint in the scene. As in, you don't want too many objects on your screen. So the map was built in a way that occlusion culling can be efficiently carried out. Occlusion culling is just a way to tell Unity that some objects can block others and thereby not have them be drawn. For example, this rock wall blocks and saves me hundreds of objects from being rendered:

Internally, Unity's occlusion boxes are part of an octree (or something similar). It's a giant box that encapsulates the entire map and then subdivides it into smaller boxes:

In the image above, you can see that the occlusion boxes start at the bottom and end at the top of the map's bounding box. However, there is a lot of wasted space on the bottom layer of cubes. This layer is entirely empty. This is a huge waste of memory and can potentially mess with performance. So it is a good idea to "cut" out these layers by resizing the bounding box of your map, in this case the minimum and maximum height.

The map layout looks like this:

The yellow lines are hills that are used to block away objects for occlusion culling. The river will be a central part of resource collection and it is pretty darn long. I'm tossing the idea of using horses for transportation.

The house is not quite ready to show off but I am working on the interior and exterior. The kitchen is getting a nice upgrade:

The goal for this next update (v0.7), is to implement baking and in order to bake, you are going to have to go out and find ingredients to make bread. This will include wheat, eggs, and water. Troid is currently modeling a chicken. The player is going to have to chase wild chickens for eggs. Maybe cooperate with the loli to catch them easier.

Stay tuned.