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Glassix 2 v0.8 release? Troubleshooting help required...
🕑 Added 2023-09-02 13:30:33 +0000 UTCHi everybody!
I didn't notice it was already the 2nd of September and missed my deadline for the release of the new version... But this is due to some crash in the compiled game which doesn't happen in the game editor and I can't figure out why even after looking online for several days... I'm looking for some help by simply loading the game and completing the tutorial and see if you get any crash in this new version.
Changelog
- Channel packed irises textures
- Optimized hair mesh to reduce vertex count
- Added SSGI, SSAO and SSR
- Hair materials are now opaque to avoid issue with SSGI
- Added water layer on city map
- Added button to toggle lights on and off in locations
- Simplified day time system for easier control
- Enabled volumetric lighting
- Thickened wall of all locations to fix light bleeding issue
I'll have to apologize in advance but this new version has 0 new content despite what was planned originally... I should have worked on the Free mode and some new animations but I encountered some heavy random drops in FPS in locations with lots of characters during my tests, some leading to 2FPS... In short, the game was unplayable... randomly...
After investigation and lots of online documentation and posts reading about game optimization, I finally found out some of the new hair models were using 400k+ vertex... The characters themselves are 20k+ which is already a lot... So imagine a model with 20 times the amount of a character... Since the hair popped up randomly depending on the generated characters and also was only for patrons, it might explain why I didn't notice this before.
Beginner mistake in the end, I didn't expect some basic hair to use more vertex than the original characters... Anyway, this forced me to switch my focus and optimize all the hair models I could find which was kinda restrictive since shrinking the number of vertex can cause problem with morphs later... I could reduce most hair models to 20% of the vertex count while keep morphs valid, I think but it took lots of time.
Another delay for this new version is due to personal life matter, I'm moving to a new unfurnished apartment and had to take care of stuff for that which reduced work time. We should have completely moved by the end of next week so hopefully I'll be able to resume a normal work schedule.
The other time consumer for this new version is the global illumination system I've been looking into. This was supposed to be point number 3 to look into but after receiving several feedback about ugly graphics and characters, I decided to look into it first to solve this issue. Since Glassix 2 uses fully dynamic content, most of the best lighting solutions are not available. I'll skip some details and just say I've currently went with a Unity native solution called SSGI which kinda do what I want, but not enough. The result is still not satisfying thought the interiors now do get lit from sun and moon lights rather than having an average ambient light which was making everything look blend. I'll still need to tinker with this to get the better results, I also have a potential purchased asset which could replace that for better quality but couldn't make it work yet, not enough time on hand... So... Still not done on this aspect unfortunately...
One downside of this SSGI system is that it doesn't illuminate transparent materials, such as glass... or hair. So I had to make hair opaque too which currently makes them look kinda ugly, sorry about that :/ One good thing from this is, I finally understood I didn't use the full potential of the Unity shaders, be it skin, hair or outfits, and am currently missing some textures (mostly ambient occlusion and some specular for hair) which would make the game look better. But due to the amount of new textures it would require plus the other issues, I did not have time to test it further but I hope it'll lead me closer to good visual quality which is still lacking in the game at the moment.
I've also added water layer on the city map which should make it better looking than the clouds. Plus it's a native Unity feature and low cost so it should work fine even on low specs. Here is a preview.
Anyway, after all those issues and testing, I finally tried to release the new optimized version to get some feedback from low end spec users and see if it's better for them but I ran into a 100% crash occurrence in the new build of the game and I can't figure out the cause. It's a basic memory leak happening randomly either when the city is loading or when I move into a location. After 2 days of looking into it and still no idea on how to fix it, I decided to release the version as is at the moment since memory leak can happen due to the player hardware itself and I know it happened to me for other stuff so it might simply be an issue on my end and might work for you all. So if you have the chance, could you simply play the tutorial and let me know if you encounter any trouble? If it crashes, could you send me the player log file located in folder "C:/Users/<user>/AppData/LocalLow/Gaweb Studio/Glassix 2"? That would be helpful.
As for the rest of the development, I'm aware the last 4 months have been lacking in new content and with poor results in term of visual quality. I'd like to speed up the work on Glassix 2 and reduce the occurrence of those crashes which happen more often when lot of stuff has been changed at the same time. Instead of releasing several features in one monthly version like before, I'll aim to release 1 feature at a time twice a month. Next planned feature would be the Free mode and after that, some proper daily life animations and reactions. At least that's the plan, not sure if I'll be able to keep up with it, we'll see.
Anyway, sorry again for the lack of content in this new version, I hope you'll understand :x
Thanks for your patience and support!
