I'm still beavering away at the game, and making good progress on re-building the core components, using what I've learned to do things a little bit better than before. I've made a tough choice to ditch the High Definition Render Pipeline and move to the Built In Render Pipeline. While HDRP gives beautiful, real life results, it is just so difficult to tune. For me, anyway, with my limited experience. The switch from to BIRP took me from a baseline of around 40 FPS to around 120 FPS, so it really is significant! The overall polished look of the game suffers slightly, but is a worthwhile compromise for me, as it allows me to focus on the game, rather than pouring over performance profile stats and working around HDRP's numerous bugs and challenges.

Some highlights since the last update:

• Moved from High Definition Render Pipeline to Built-In Render Pipeline.
• Refreshed game map, with more settlements, roads and features.
• I've moved the whole project to an "additive scene" setup. This means I've broken down the whole game into "layers", that are combined at run time. I can work on specific layers in the Unity Editor, such as the terrain or small settlements, without having to load and manage the entire game world. This has massively sped up the whole editor experience and has been a revelation really. I'm able to iterate much faster on changes and test them out very quickly.
• I'm working through lightmap baking, occlusion culling, and a host of other techniques that should greatly improve performance. I'm adding "Quality" settings throughout, to give players the option to balance looks and FPS, hoping to reach a broader audience of players with a range of hardware.
• Animal AIs are reworked with root motion, meaning they look and move much more naturally. I've reverted back to Emerald AI for the animals and enemy creatures, as is just gave me a better return on investment in terms of effort to produce good-looking, reasonably simple behaviour.
• NPC is back in Invector FSM AI, and I'm building some state models that implement home and workplace features adding some life to the world. I've added "barks" to NPCs too, allowing them to chit-chat to the player as they pass by. I think it looks really cool!
• Lighting and weather are now back to Enviro. While initially the HDRP Time of Day solution looked better, the latest version looks worse and is lacking a lot of the API and features of Enviro. I'm really happy with how the exterior lighting, clouds and fog look in my latest build.
• I've standardised all terrain details, trees, grass and flowers using The Vegetation Engine. This gives me a very consistent look and feel, as well as a universal method of applying wetness, wind and snow effects to vegetation.
• I've settled on Microsplat for the terrain textures, giving me another consistent way of applying snow, wetness and other terrain effects. All of these systems work together, allowing me to dampen the ground, trees and grass or apply snow effects across the environment, in response to Enviro weather

Watch this space and thanks for reading!