Weekend Update 07/21/24 (Patreon)

Warning: The build attached is extremely buggy and is being uploaded simply as a demonstration of where the game is at for the upgrades described below.

This week I continued to overhaul the night loading system but ran into continuing issues that I believe could be caused by the old version of Unity that the game was being built in (2021.1.0f1). That version was the most up to date version of Unity the last time I upgraded, but not only was that a long time ago, the version was not a "Long Term Support" version of the editor which means there wasn't as much error testing put into it as other versions of the editor. I've upgraded to the latest LTS version which is 2022.3 which should help solve issues I'm having with the editor and hopefully make implementing the other overhauls I'm working on less prone to breaking. It also should finally get rid of the stupid "Trial Version" bug that kept popping up in the bottom right of the last few builds.

Before I get into the negatives, I'll just quickly mention that upgrading the Unity version does have some benefits. The URP rendering engine will be upgraded which might increase graphics or performance or add additional features to shaders which I'll be able to add. There may be some runtime errors that user's previously experienced that no longer occurs. And finally there are new features such as animation rigging that I'll be able to look into adding.

But onto the negatives:

I don't often change the version of Unity because FuckNAF is a very old game with code, addons, and assets that are sometimes almost a decade old. This can result in those things breaking and with the high number of old assets that makes the issues almost guaranteed. This upgrade is no exception, so far I've nailed down all the game-critical bugs but there are still some visual bugs I'm very aware of.

First and most noticeably the lightmaps were destroyed and need to be remade. However, due to some changes to how the lightmaps are being unpacked there are some serious issues with lights and shadows being generated in more than one spot resulting in really unappealing results. I've tracked down the problem and the remedy is that I'll need to break up the game map into smaller files and redo the UV's on some of the meshes, just so they don't overlap.

Second, Springtrap and Murder's hair used what was at the time experimental physics addon. That addon unsurprisingly was not compatible with the upgrade and it will need to be updated. That should be a straightforward fix, I'll just need to redo the physics on each bots hair.

There may also be issues with certain materials loading improperly, if you see a bright blue or hot pink glowing texture where there shouldn't be one let me know.