Corona is still going on and so is our work. Performance improvements in Elemental War, demo for Tri6: Infinite coming soon, a Spine update and progress on Red Skies: Ascension – this and more now in the progress report!

This report covers Elemental War, Red Skies: Ascension, Spine and Tri6: Infinite.

Elemental War

We already talked about the upcoming performance improvements in Elemental War last month. So in April we worked a lot on them. So far we upgraded Unity from 2017.4 to 2019.3, which is the most recent version. That’s necessary to get the full potential out of Unity. And then we upgraded to render pipeline in use from the built-in (legacy) pipeline to the new Universal Render Pipeline (URP).

So, both upgrades went more or less without problems. The Unity upgrade itself was easy, the upgrade to URP took a while because we had to adjust quite a few shaders. It’s not 100% complete yet, but the missing stuff are just minor tweaks to improve the look again.

On the performance side we ran our benchmark in Elemental War and the results are pretty cool. In 1080p we now reach average values of 60-80 fps (zoomed in vs zoomed out view). And UHD also almost got an average of 30fps for both zoomed in and out (while the average before the upgrade was at 10-20fps). This on a GTX 970 and an i7 4790k. Keep in mind that so far we more or less just improved the GPU performance.

The work on the CPU optimizations already started. So far the whole monster movement and the monster updates are moved to DOTS. Not everything is multithreaded and not everything is already better now (but also not worse!), but we need to update a lot of code to get the best out of it and we can’t change everything at once.

The GPU improvements are already available on the dev-branch (beta branch) on Steam if you want to try it out. We’re continuing work on the CPU side during the next weeks and will release updates on the beta branch from time to time, maybe every week, but that depends on how much relevant progress we made there. We hope to get the improvements done in May, but we’ll see how it works out in the end.

Red Skies: Ascension

In April we talked a lot about the Red Skies: Ascension demo. The concept for the important part of the level and the main spots of the demo story are defined and Carsten is working on the level now while Sebastian will finetune the overall concept. As soon as there is some more time I will join there as well and first get our dialog tool up and running so we can add content then. This won’t happen in May though due to Elemental War and Tri6: Infinite, but June sounds realistic.

Read more about Red Skies: Ascension on the dedicated homepage. There you will also see how you can support us with the development of the game.

Spine

Spine got updated to Spine 1.18.0 in April which focussed on some user requests. We added the release date of projects to the info page, added a hint to info pages when there is no content yet and also improved the download display so you now can see more easily how the download progress is.

The next update will be released in around two weeks and will be a mix of user requests like a display of the date the project was last updated and new features. There we mainly concentrated on support for other games than Gothic 1 and 2. More on this soon, either in the next Spine update news or in the next progress report!

If you still miss mods or have problems, feel free to leave a comment or join our Discord.

Tri6: Infinite

Tri6: Infinite got a lot of updates during April as we’re working a lot on improving balancing and fixing bugs. There almost aren’t any problems left, most is cosmetic stuff and balancing also got improved a lot so far and we’re close to something satisfying here.

In May we will continue to improve the game as well as finally start to port to consoles. The best news here is that we also got approved as developer for Nintendo Switch. That’s very nice, especially as Tri6: Infinite was designed with Switch in mind right from the beginning.

Also happening in May, more precisely already next week, we will finally add the new UI to Tri6: Infinite. It looks amazing and worlds better than the current placeholder. We will post screens or even a new video when it’s done.

Another great news is that Tri6: Infinite will be supported by SCILL Play. SCILL Play allows to get additional challenges for supported games. There aren’t many supported games yet, but we got asked and think it’s a great idea and Tri6: Infinite is kinda made for such challenges.

And then we decided to release a demo of the game during the Steam Game Festival in June. The demo will just contain one of the three vehicles and four of the eleven powerups, but besides that it will be more or less equal to the full game version.

If you’re interested in this kind of game and want to try it out and share your opinion with us, wishlist it and join our Discord and talk with us about it!

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Keep an eye on our homepage, Discord and Twitter, as we’ll provide more informations there when we have something to share. And of course also check out the next progress reports in the following months. You can also leave a comment here to share your opinions and subscribe to our newsletter to never miss an important news.

If you missed our last progress report, you can find it here: Progress Report April 2020.