I’m working on a sequel to my TriBlaster series. This time I wanted to do the graphics and style justice.
This is not a simple update to the existing code base (for TriBlaster 3). It’s a complete fresh from the ground up re-write. One simple goal; to make this the best coin-op arcade shooter experience.
I initially started using classical Unity dev and quickly hit a wall with the number of vector lines I could render and animate. I think I tried every line drawing package in the asset store. None of them were ideal for dynamic high quality lines. They either looked pretty (and slow) or fast (but static).
This started me down a path of creating my own custom line renderer. This is where I restarted again; this time using Unity DOTS. It took about 2.5 months; but I built a very fast system in DOTS that feeds data into a compute shader that renders the lines.
On a steam deck at HD resolution I can easily render 60K+ dynamic separate lines (each one with their own transform) at 60 FPS. On a steam deck I can run the game at 4K resolution (when docked) and still get a consistent 45 FPS.
On a M1 Mac I easily get over 120 FPS.
So, that’s the tech I’m building this on. Realtime tessellation of anything that I can render; it’s a beautiful thing…
I’ll post here with updates from time to time.
