LOD

Nope, it's not Lord of Destruction... Of course, I meant level of detail in the title. Currently I am testing a simple LOD system (for Unity Free) based on the one I found on Unity forums (Thanks to Westmark). I already made some modifications on it. I disable game objects with it which contains the meshes (instead of changing the mesh within the mesh renderer component). Also I'll make it more versatile, it'll be possible to set the distances for each details instead of the current system. Working well, but I have no idea about the memory usage yet. All the details have to be on the scene, but in a disabled state. So they are preloaded.

I am targetting mobile devices and mobiles / tablets has usually small screen and / or low resolution. Small screen / low resolution means, you can't see everything in a high detail. So it is possible to make the lower detail models much lower than on PC. Wheels will be very angular in the lowest detail, however they'll be detailed in highest detail and cockpit view. Probably the most simple car model will be around 500-600 triangles, the highest detail will be around 2500-3000 (tyres and driver included). I have no performance data yet, but I think, this LOD script is efficient.

Haladás, fejlődés, teljesítménybeli javulás

Apró lépésekben haladok az autó versenyzős játék projekttel. Jelenleg modelleket finomítgatok. De mielőtt erről szó esne részletesen, lássuk, mi is történt pár nappal ezelőtt.

Performance test results with wheel colliders

I made some tests with my Unity project on my Nexus 7. I just made very simple "cars" (boxes with 4 wheel colliders) and at the end, I felt satisfaction!

Let the coding horror begin!

Hello people of internet!

This is my post about my game development progress. Well, I am trying to make a racing game for Android. My main development tool is Unity (the free version). I am still new to mobile game development. It's a little bit different than making games for PC or other high performance consoles. Mobile devices are still not as fast as desktop computers. Both GPU and CPU are weaker, some devices has low amount of RAM and storage. So it is limited and developers have to be very clever at optimizing games.

Profiling is not very easy without Unity Pro's profiler, but I found a great solution called Adreno Profiler which doesn't work on all the mobiles, but it runs with my Nexus 7 2nd Generation. So finally, I have a profiler, I can see, what costs more or less in rendering, so I can tweak my game and test again and again. It's a great tool, and easy to use. Well, this program quickly gave me ideas, how to make graphical performance higher. However, I didn't find out, how to check CPU usage in it. I have a simple CPU usage monitor on my Android device, but I can't figure out, what are the most expensive calculations.

A great method to figure out, where is your graphics bottle-necking.

Actually, I have a serious problem. My game is greatly bottleneck at physics I think. I'm not sure, but the more the cars the less the performance. I mean seriously, I put 4-6 more cars, and FPS decreases. It's not good, especially talking about a Nexus 7 which has a decent hardware. I tried out making the car meshes more simple (I just used a simple box), same problem, so the problem is not graphical, but more like the calculations are too much for Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU. Very disappointing, I need to find an other was for physics, I guess. Actually, I was very happy with the current physics.

Don't know, what to do now... Well, I need to figure out, what is the exact reason for the bad performance. I need to simplify the physics as much as possible without making it very unrealistic and bad. More experiments tomorrow. For today, I am out!

Game Development album #1

Weird dream which would be a great game idea...

Oh, what a horrible night to have a nightmare...

I want to share a weird dream with you. I hope you enjoy it! This happened at December 6, 2013.

Oh, well, that was weird. I felt like I was in a video game. I lost my memory about my dream almost, but still I can remember some events, characters, places.

Review: Street Fighter 2010 - The Final Fight (NES)

Title screen of Street Fighter 2010 - The Final Fight (US version)

Street Fighter 2010 - The Final Fight (or 2010: Street Fighter in Japan) is not really a Street Fighter game. It has nothing to do with Street Fighter except in the US version the main character called as Ken (Kevin Stryker in te JP version).

Little progress... Tree and track design

I am getting on the right track with racing game development in Unity. I have a decent (but far from great) car physics for mobile, and now track design is getting better too. Also, I figured out, how should I make tree sprites quickly in high quality.

Crossed tree sprite in the background... well I won't leave it there it's too dangerous!