Demo 1.2

Version 1.2 of the RPG Demo is now available for download.  An extremely helpful Facebook fan found some glaring bugs with triggers in the opening level that have been patched up (seriously, some were super embarrassing and I’m not sure how they haven’t been caught up until now), and some little camera wonkinesses have also been fixed.  Also found a little bug with the LFG diploma that’s now resolved.

What took much longer was updating the project to Unity 5, which is finally, FINALLY complete. Originally I was just going to plow on ahead in 4.6, but the promise of instant performance boosts, better lighting, and improved audio mixing was finally too much.  And for the record, yes, Unity’s claim that you can expect any physics calcs to drop by half was actually completely true.  I would have been happy with a 10% performance increase out of box, but got almost 45%.  So, yay for that.

We also made some shader updates (after an artist freaked out about the draw calls) and have halved the draw calls in most scenes, so woot for even more performance boosts. The current GI implementation is pretty rudimentary at best – most of the lighting still needs a solid update pass but it’s at least all using the new system now.

For the most part the transition from 4.6 to 5 was far more painless than I expected, with almost everything coming out unscathed on the end (a few script files had to be manually updated, but it really wasn’t that bad.  Took an afternoon, tops, to fix those).  What sucked far more was fixing all the damn tree shaders.  For whatever reason (and it’s WELL complained about on the Unity forums), the old tree shader royally effs up leaves now on all the alpha cutoffs, leaving you with a shimmery, shining mess of disgustingness.  Fixing was straightforward – make new native nature materials for all the leaves and reapply all the old settings, but having to go through all the prefabs and update them was a major pain in the butt.  Major pain. Not pleased.  Much rage.

Danger Not To Scale

In a different vein, next week we’ll be launching a new kind of product – an adventure supplement for D&D 5e (or any d20 system, really).  Available in both print ($14.99) and digital pdf ($3.95), basic details and a downloadable sample are up here.  For the first time ever, I’ll also be cross-listing stuff on DriveThruRPG, so we’ll see how that goes.

Not sure yet if it’s something I’ll continue, as they do take an atrocious amount of time to write/layout/test, but I do have some basic outlines for a few more adventures. I *reeeeeaallly* want to flesh out this one around the Deck of Many Things so bad.  Cause it is.  So bad.  And hey, wouldn’t it be nice to package it with a printed deck too?  Yeah.  That’d be nice.  Need to see first tho’ if the endeavor is worth the time investment. So little time now to go around.  Sighs.