Continuing Feature Parity Part 6 (Patreon)

Took an extra day to write this devpost. Was busy. Anyways, I'm ramping up to reintroduce the onsen map to get v0.9 back up to speed with the older release.

These past few days I was ugprading the assets to the latest Unity version for HDRP. Some shaders were broken and so I had to recreate them to make them work. However, everything looks so much nicer now!

Here's a texture of the old grass material available in older releases:

Here's an upgraded version:

The big difference in the upgrade is a different shading model that makes lighting look extra spicy. It also uses texture ambient occlusion so I had to reexport some stuff out of Substance Painter to make it look as good as the grass picture.

I am working on bringing back the day night cycle and some more landscape props before releasing this version in the next devpost. Not much to show this devpost other than pretty pictures. Still nice to look at. I think the map won't be as big as the old one mainly so I can fit more stuff and be extra performant. This brings me to a very important announcement:

Taking into consideration the trajectory of VR, it seems wireless VR devices are the future. At the moment there is only the Quest 2 but there have been rumors about Valve or Microsoft or even Apple entering the competition very soon. On top of working with HDRP, there is a big incentive to downscale the size of maps for Viva from now on. Therefore I will be miniaturizing the map into sections to properly support Quest 2 and whatever future headsets are released. This also saves me work!

This decision won't change the development of the project and the first Quest 2 build won't be ready until after this upcoming beta. But it should be easy to built out of Unity.

Stay tuned!