Today was an absolute nightmare. I spent 15 hours at a stretch to optimize the game, implement new magical effects and solve two bugs with the caustics in the water. For this I spoke with three developers of modules (so-called assets) implemented in the game, who all gave fantastic service, but had to admit themselves that somehow, I had succeeded in finding bugs no one else had found yet. Why is it always me?
The newly implemented magical effects look oh so beautiful and much more sophisticated than the older ones, but due to a bug in the rendering of decals in Unity, our engine, they caused lag spikes up to 1 FPS. Mind you, that’s on an i9 with a 1080 Ti and 64 MB of RAM on board. In the end the Vietnamese developer of the effects and I decided to temporarily turn the decals off. Then it turned out that the spell effects assumed they were always alone, so that subsequent hits of second, third and fourth fireballs fired in succession were never detected. This I had to solve myself.
Next were the caustics in the water. I spent two hours with the German developer of the water module to find out that both bugs were caused by the new vegetation asset I had implemented in the game. This was eventually solved by moving all vegetation to different layers in the game, and then have the water engine ignore these layers when projecting the caustics.
During all this I also communicated with the American developer of the vegetation, who was already aware of said issue, so though tiring, it was a very international happening 😀
Anyway, here is the result. I hope you like it!
