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The first thing on the experimental agenda is moving over to Unity 5.
One of the biggest sales pitches of Unity 5 is the new fully deferred renderer and physically based shading. The switch to a proper deferred renderer will be great, but unfortunately not as easy as pressing the "upgrade" button. There's a lot of custom stuff going on in Stranded Deep which was necessary to get the most out of the engine we've been working with. If you've been following our blog posts for a while, you'll know that we are already doing physically based shading along with various other effects like faking skybox global illumination and a lot of different depth techniques for our effects. So in visual terms, the engine upgrade won't really do that much for now. But hopefully later on we can integrate even more graphical features like dynamic global illumination, screen space reflections and such.
There's a few new features that should improve performance though. The physics engine has been upgraded both in speed and the quantity of objects it can handle. Stranded Deep uses a lot of physics so this should be a great improvement. There's also the new UI system that we'll be transitioning over to. We haven't had much of a chance to look at it, but hopefully there's some performance to be gained. The current system we're using has some annoying workarounds and a fairly significant performance overhead. Every bit counts :)
After we've ported over, we'll get back into the guts of the game. The construction system was in the middle of a rework before the last hotfix so that'll be high on the list. We've got a lot of great ideas for new systems and they all centre around the theme of scavenging. We really want to incorporate more scavenging for more unique structures and tools. We'll fill you in with more details when we get to these, but here's a few teasers of some concepts —
There's a heap of other systems that will be getting re-worked as well and we'll keep you informed as it happens. Starting from this post, we're going back to fortnightly blog updates on our website as mentioned in the last update. If you're not keen on trying out the experimental build first hand, this will be a good way to keep up with the progress of the game and see what we're working on.
That's it from us for now. We'll have a hotfix coming out soon for the stable build and then stay posted for further info on the new experimental builds.
Stay Alive!
:: Beam Team