Issue #122 - All About Occlusion Culling, and more!

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Read and watch all about occlusion culling and how you can implement your own system that best fits and performs for your game. Plenty more on top of that, so enjoy!

Significant Bits - Random encounters are a very contentious subject in JRPGs. Fans often brand it as a relic from the past, but some have a fondness for how it separates combat from exploration and creates a sense of surprise.
significant-bits.com

How much of a genius-level move was using binary space partitioning in Doom? - That story about Carmack applying cutting-edge academic research to video games has always impressed me. It is my explanation for why Carmack has become such a legendary figure. He deserves to be known as the archetypal genius video game programmer for all sorts of reasons, but this episode with the academic papers and the binary space partitioning is the justification I think of first.
arstechnica.com

Feature preview: IL2CPP Full Generic Sharing in Unity 2022.1 beta - Full Generic Sharing allows you to write code that’s more expressive and easier to test. It not only eliminates a whole class of scripting errors detectable at runtime, but ensures that code on platforms like mobile devices and consoles behave more predictably. Read on to learn how.
Unity

What’s new in Cloud Content Delivery - We’ve added new features and integrations to improve your experience and get new content to your users faster.
Unity

Randomizing Particles Textures - Here's a very easy and effective way of randomizing your Particle System textures
Gerard Belenguer @GerardBelenguer

Unity 2022.1.0 Beta 2 - Unity 2022.1.0 Beta 2 has been released.
unity3d.com

Videos

Subnautica Postmortem - In this 2019 GDC postmortem, Unknown Worlds Entertainment's Jonas Boetel explains how open development saved Subnautica. Boetel explains what open development is, what it means, and how it affects every part of the independent game making process. [not new, but definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it]
GDC

How Occlusion Culling Works - This mini-series introduces occlusion culling as a companion series for my upcoming tutorial on implementing occlusion culling in a game engine. This video introduces what the problem is and why it's important, and the upcoming videos talk about what approaches can be used to solve the problem.
thebennybox

Grounded Water Drop FX in Unity | GPUMAN - This video explains how to implement a similar effect to Grounded Water Drops in Unity.
GPUMAN

Creating a Bubbly Pixel Art Acid Pool in Unity - Today I just wanted to show off a little effect that I created for one of the obstacles in Insignia over the last couple of weeks. I was pretty happy with the result after trying a few different approaches, so here's a vlog covering the process.
AdamCYounis

Unity VFX Graph - Holographic Map Tutorial - Let's see how to create an Holographic Map with a Render Texture in VFX Graph! It's a pretty interesting exercise with this amazing Unity tool we just need Visual Effect Graph and a Camera. Hope you enjoy it!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Melee Combat & Weapon System - Unity Beginner Tutorial - In this beginner easy tutorial I will show you how to make a melee system for your game. This tutorial will cover how to create the mechanics of the weapon, animations and how to make it work in actual combat. I will go over how to deal damage with the weapon to enemies and how to set those enemies up. This is a more in depth tutorial as I wanted to give you the foundations of your melee system that you can use in your own game. At the end you will have an awesome universal melee system. That can be changed and easily implemented into your project.
Zyger

Make your Animations DYNAMIC with Animation Rigging! (Unity Tutorial) - Let's learn how to use Unity Animation Rigging package which allows you to add dynamic logic on top of your animations.
Code Monkey

How to Make a Falling Snow in Unity - In this video, I will show you how to create a falling snow effect using the Unity particle system. How to make a Blizzard. 5 ways how to optimize the Unity particle system. And how to set up the final snowfall scene in Unity.
LMHPOLY

Among Us and Unity | Unity Gaming Services - From multiplayer infrastructure to managing player insights, learn how InnerSloth has used Unity Gaming Services to build and manage the most popular mobile game in the world.
Unity

Unity Slerp Visualized - Like lerp, but rotund - Vector3.Slerp is the unpopular younger brother of lerp, but it doesn't need to be that way! It has a load of utility once you learn how it works.
Tarodev

Assets

New Year Sale 50% off - Over 8,000 assets are available at up to 50% off in the Asset Store.

Plus, use coupon code HELLO2022 for an additional 5% off the sale price on orders over $150
Unity Affiliate

Atmospheric GPU Fog Particles - Textureless fog particles for Unity using a highly customizable shader to attenuate multiple layers of noise. Works great as pseudo-volumetric atmospheric fog to add spooky and/or immersive vibes to your 3D levels.
MirzaBeig Open Source

InkPainter - This asset allows you to Texture-Paint on Unity.
EsProgram Open Source

Learn To Create Game Art In Blender - Learn 3D modeling and animation with Blender, discover how to create characters and environments, and teach yourself the digital art skills you need to make games today with this set of hands-on courses from GameDev.tv! Get the Complete Blender Creator Course to build a foundation, and work on specialized techniques with Blender Character Creator Course and Complete Drawing Course. Plus, your purchase will support Women in Games International!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Learn To Program by Developing Games with Unity - We've teamed up with Packt for our newest bundle! Get ebooks like Blender 3D By Example, Second Edition, Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2020, Fifth Edition, Game Development Patterns with Unity 2021, Second Edition, Unity 2021 Cookbook, Fourth Edition, and Hands-On Unity 2021 Game Development, Second Edition. Plus, your purchase will support GameChanger!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

GPU Occlusion Culling - This package will improve performance by culling objects that are occluded by other objects in your scene. It uses the GPU slightly more but reduces CPU pressure by drastically reducing drawcalls.
Ciprian Stanciu Affiliate

Unity GPU Based Occlusion Culling - It is an early prototype of custom occlusion culling system, for both static and dynamic objects. This asset is intended especially for situations, when you can't use benefits from built-in Unity Occlusion Culling (loading custom prefabs from bundles or Streaming Assets), you use forward rendering and high-poly geometry etc.
przemyslawzaworski Open Source

Per-Project Preference Utility for Unity Tools Development - This is a per-project preference utility useful for Unity tools development. It's similar to Unity's EditorPrefs, except that it stores key-value record pairs as a scriptable object asset in the current project rather than modifying the machine's registry like EditorPrefs.
TheAllenChou Open Source

Welcome to the Pixel Anti-Cheat! - This toolkit is designed to keep your game safe. Pixel Anticheat is a set of useful modules to prevent cheating and game memory intrusion.
TinyPlay Open Source

Unity AI - The aim of this package is to provide AI related tools in Unity.
voxell-tech Open Source

TB Animator Hash Generator - A Unity tool that auto-generates files containing cached, type-safe variables for the Animator Controller parameters in your project.
turbobutton Open Source

Joystick With Control Path - A virtual Joystick and a virtual touch zone that uses Unity's New Input System Control Path.
rehtse-studio Open Source

CloudOnce - Unified Game Services API - CloudOnce is a Unity plug-in that provides a unified game services API for Google Play Game Services and Apple Game Center (iOS & tvOS). Ease of use is the primary focus for the plug-in, but it also attempts to satisfy the needs of power users.
jizc Open Source

MightyTerrainMesh - A Unity Plugin for Converting Terrain 2 Mesh with LOD & QaudTree infomation.
jinsek Open Source

SqlCipher4Unity3D - I created SqlCipher4Unity3D, a plugin that helps you to use libsqlcipher in your Unity3d projects in a clear and easy way and works in iOS, Android, OSX, Windows, Android projects.
netpyoung Open Source

Spotlight

Moo Lander - Moo Lander is a 2D platformer with lots of environmental puzzles and resource management. You take control of the Lander – the last hero of а dying cosmic civilization. Your mission is to locate and obtain enough milk – the most important energy source in the universe. The milk itself is found only on the ancient planet of the Mighty Alien Cows. Doing battle with those great beasts yields you the precious milk – a much needed element for your quest!
[You can follow them on Twitter, watch a short documentary, and get it on Steam]
The Sixth Hammer

You can subscribe to the free weekly newsletter on GameDevDigest.com

This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.