Progress Update

Information about the progress of the game creation and other stuff
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Des
Posts: 882
Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2011 5:23 pm

Progress Update

Post by Des »

Hello everyone,

In this update of my Dev Journal, I will cover some of the things that I have been doing which are primarily learning and research into Unity3D to be used in the new CSK game client. At this time it is possible that you may not already be aware but you will be soon enough. Adobe Flash Player for browsers is reaching the end of life and will no longer be supported by any of the main browsers( Firefox, Chrome, Safari and etc... ). How does this directly affect CSK? that's a great question, currently, the CSK client that is played in the browser uses the Flash plugin to be playable which means if the browsers no longer support the Flash plugin and disable it entirely then the CSK Flash client will never load in the first place and be completely unusable. This is one of the reasons that the game client is being rebuilt, for more details on this topic please read my previous dev journals.

During my research into Unity3D, I have been learning quite a lot about the development application and how it is used, even from the beginning I really liked it for its rich capabilities and its ability to build/compile a product( app/game ) to a wide variety of platforms( mobile/desktop/etc... ). However, with this wide range of capabilities that this development application has also come with it a wide range of topics to learn, it's own unique technical complexity and varying levels of difficulty for each topic and subtopic.

There is so much to learn about Unity3D and not enough time to learn it all so I have to focus my research and learning time on what I believe is directly relevant to CSK and it's value of importance for implementation. That doesn't mean I didn't experiment and have a little bit of fun with it. Here is an example of using the Universal Renderer Pipeline with post-processing and Shader Graph.

I used a simple online tutorial to make this dissolve shader
Image

Here is the effect that it does.
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There are so many interesting effects and other types of things that can be done with Unity3D that I would like to explore further in the future but that is for another time. I have also been doing performance tests on mobile vs desktop with various different effects, lighting, post-processing and etc.. and there is no comparison in that desktop is so much more powerful while mobile devices are left in the dust. This lead me down various paths of seeing if certain functionality can be optimized enough that it can be done on mobile and it can be on most new or high-end devices. However my goal is to aim for the low-mid range of devices to be able to reach the largest target platforms as possible. In these type of situations, I have to make a decision and my decision was that I will not at this time attempt to implement some of these nice visual effects, lighting, normal maps and etc... that doesn't mean that none of them are viable for mobile devices, it just means I have to be selective and use caution when implementing. Anyway without going into further technical details this has been my experience so far, I really like what Unity3D brings to the table and I am looking forward to building the CSK game client in Unity to be used for various devices and platforms.

Now moving onto something that is even more fascinating is that we are reaching the 10 year birthday of CSK, I know it hard to believe but the game server officially went online for public beta testing on 2010/06/07. I know it has not been an easy 10 years for any of us but in roughly 3 weeks from now on 2020/06/07 the server will be turning 10 years old. For this special occasion please join me for a rare broadcast that I will be doing to celebrate 10 years of awesomeness and an overview of where it started, where it is now, and direction of where this project is going. After all this day of celebration is not just for the server but also for the small community that has formed from this project. More details to come as we get closer to the birthday date.

I also want to say thanks for those of you who made an unofficial CSK Discord channel which is growing on a regular basis. I appreciate it and I like it when others show their support in this type of manner.

Thank you for reading and take care :)
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