Adding This One Thing Made my Game Look 327% Better 

An easy way to optimize the grass more is to disable them from casting shadows. They can still recieve shadows from other objects but won't cats any themselves.

Tip: have the grass models be only two triangles. One upside down and one right side up on top of it. This will allow you to speed up the game tremendously without sacrificing too much. The grass in Breath of the Wild is actually only two triangles as well.

I like the tree shaking a lot more than the camera doing so. Maybe just add the screen shake on the last hit, when the tree explodes (Or when it hits the ground in the future perhaps). I think the problem with the tree shake right now is how the base of the trunk is moving, when really that part should be static. I think you should use the camera shake when getting hit by enemies instead, maybe add a red vignette or a blue one since you play as a robot (electricity/sparks).

Good video! A good next steps for your optimizations are: Textured cutouts rather than full poly grass. Occulusion drawing (rather than drawing everything from a circle. Do it like the line of sight) Lod grass. The farther the grass the less detailed it should be~ Then colored grass would be an awesome next visual xD

I feel like there's too much grass, maybe have areas with some less dense grass clumps and areas where theres none at all, ferns and different species of fauna will help as well Also a way to improve performance further is make it so the further away something is from the player the less polygons it uses so you can be be able to render in the entire map from one spot as well as increas ethe performance of the game.

I think the sky box does really improve the look of the game. one thing I would say is that it looks more realistic than everything else in the world right now so that's maybe why it looks a bit off. maybe you could add some really simple looking cartoonish clouds that slowly move off and disappear a bit like how the Minecraft clouds do. anyways loving the game :)

I’d suggest having geographic landmarks in your world. It’s a good way to not get lost when exploring a new world. For example in ARK Survival there are unique terrain features in different locations. Once you see a giant mountain or cave, you know where you are! Regardless, loving the content, keep it up! Really enjoying watching the progress!

I think it would be nice to have a more hilly world rather than a flattish one

Grass is an absolute nightmare in Unity. Perhaps remove the realtime shadowing of the grass and add a gradient to the grass texture instead? Another neat trick I learned was to fade the grass' opacity into the ground similar to how soft particles work. :)

the brightness from the skybox looks great in my opinion! love seeing your progress

Everybody: „Damn, we need grass“ Me: „His mouse is on the left side of his keyboard“

Some tips on how to improve the grass (stolen from Breath of the Wild): - Zelda renders every blade of grass separately. It uses a straightforward model with 8 vertices for the sides (4 on each side) and another 4 in the vertical center. This allows you to make the blade more 3d like by bending on the two vertices in the middle. This 3d model has the shape of a rectangle and isn't in the shape of a blade. It uses a texture of a grass blade that bends however you modify the 3d model. This allows you to have a more complex texture. I hope I described that enough. Just ask for more information. - To increase the grass distance, replace the (already simple) model with another one that is more simple with like 6 or 4 vertices in the distance. It will look like normal grass at that distance and you don't have to animate it which also improves performance. - At a certain distance, don't render every grass blade. Render only every 2nd or 3rd or 4th blade. - Don't let the grass blades pop in. Use a smooth transition to fade them in or out. As I said if something is unclear or if you have some further questions, just ask. Maybe I can help :)

I really love the new skybox and lighting, keep up the great work, it looks amazing

when you see hills, in real life or virtual, you wll get a sense of perspective. Suddenly you realize how 'far' away stuff is, how grand the scenery is.... so adding a few distance hill might give a sense of 'scale' to your world too. Great to follow your work!

Great work, the game is really improving in looks. It reminds me of the wii sports golfing arenas which I always loved the atmosphere of growing up.

It's first video I saw from you and it's so nice watching ur journey of making a game. I was sure you gonna mention the way of rotating grass-faces to face player's camera, it wouldn't look as good as the final result though so nice work so far

Nice progress as always! I think for the terrain, it might improve the look of the hills by increasing the roughness of the perlin noise to combat that smooth look - maybe even increasing the roughness only on the hills, so that you still keep those nice rolling grassy meadows. Also spawning rocky cliff pieces on steep terrain could help with it looking bare when the grass stops - not sure what the performance would be like though. Keep it up!

I love acerola’s videos so it was cool you found his grass video! He makes a ton of videos about post processing and such and they are super useful

Love the new light! I also like how it is flatter more.

I want to say this is an really good start to making terrians! I am struggling rn with developing mine for my new game and I want to say don't let this part of level design mess with you. it takes a long time but in the end it will determine the game level

There is a free asset called ' per layer camera culling' that can do a lot of heavy lifting for that type of optimization. You assign objects to a layer, and then set the distance to show objects on that layer. For instance, I have a layer called ' tiny ' and add all little sticks, sea shells, acorns, weeds and stuff like that.. and have the distance at 10 meters. and it just works. Since the layer of a prefab is set in the inspector, it doesn't matter if it is pre-placed or added at runtime.

this game will turn out to be amazing! You improve fast

I honestly really like the flatter worlds, it makes the environment look so much more vast and pretty

Woah, the game is really taking shape, can't wait to see what comes next! Also, I personally like the flatter terrain, I think it it fits with the overall feel.

Looks great!!

Great job, this was a really interesting video

Your game looks really cool! I think the tree shaking looks better than shaking the camera tho >()

I suggest making LOD models (level of detail), basically the model gets less and lass detailed the farther away from the camera it is, so it will look nice close to you and you wont be able to tell that it looks bad far away, and if you want to have, lets say, a mountain, it would look weird to have it be completely smooth, so you can have it just be low poly and it wont even be noticeable, hope this helps :)

I didn't know a thing about GPU instancing before this video so thanks so much man! For the global look of the game I would add a bit of post processing effect like bloom and motion blur and other shiny stuff like that. But I think what would improve it instantly with no cost is to just activate the fog in lighting options in rendering (assuming you work with Unity). That could really give a sense of depth and distance to your game!

this channel is underrated! glad i found this masterpiece before im late :)

5:04 for this I would say learn knock back

Fantastic vid! Im not sure if this has been menitioned yet but I think if you are having issues with finding items on the ground you could take a borderlands approach and add a small beacon on each item depending on the type and rarity of the object. Also subscribed, I love finding more game dev youtubers

i think that making the top of the grass brighter or the bottom darker would be a great effect to fake ambient occlusion, also randomly scaling the grass can make it look more natural

Your welcome for sending the video!

I think a cool feature to add more life into the map would be different type of terrain/biomes. Possibly like snow terrain, sand terrain, etc. Just a thought!!

Looks fantastic!

the brighter lighting looks way better

You could use occlusion culling, instead of chunking the terrain. It renders only what the camera sees (within a group of static objects).

Vegetation Studio is on sale from time to time and really worth it. I'm experimenting with a scene right now that brings Unity standard terrain trees and grass down to single-digit frames while VS still runs it at 50 fps.

Great video! I'm not in a state, where I can write a proper constructive criticism, I need time to collect my thoughts, but I wanted to write a comment for the algorithm. Expect to see this comment change soon.

These changes are great! I cant even Imagine how long it took. I think the lighter sky complements the world well and you should keep it that way but maybe have transitions for things like fights or night. idk. But keep up the crazy coding man

Next step in optimisation is frustrum culling! Unless it is on, which i don t think so! Basically, it makes the game render only what the camera can see! That will definitely improve performance by alot! Also, good luck! Game starts to look good! Keep up the good work!

The sky box makes EVERYTHING better its much better but a different HDRI sky box would probably do the same for the game so tweak it how you want 👍 the game is also at the point where i think the Graphix are good enough that it wouldn't be something to stop me from buying it and wouldn't annoy me.

Looks already pretty nice :) and I totally agree not having grass in your game is not an option in 2022. Small remark: You could also use a noise texture that spans across your world for color variation of the grass: For each grass object you would look up the value of the noise texture and use it as a multiplier. In this way you can get darker / lighter grass very cheaply. You can also move the noise texture (or use another one) to simulate cloud movement.

I would change the ungrassed grass texture to look more like the grassed grass, so the ungrassed grass doesn't look so flat, cause it stands out a lot even though it's at a distance.

the tree shake looked better ngl

Additional to Shadows, if you disable directional shadows you can add contact shadows in its place, it's much cheaper solution if you still want to keep shadows (however not necessary for stylised games). Also consider additional camera frustum culling of your chunks, this adds some CPU cost on top but it has an additional save to GPU from not rendering behind view. Mesh vertex density The smaller the triangles to pixel ratio is, the absolute worse GPU processing will be, along with alpha cutout overdraw, these two alone can cripple performance more than the amount of veggies. Finally frame debugger, you want to check this regularly that your instancing or instancing indirect meshes are correctly rendering and not failing forcing it through a different render loop ( or worse a static batch render which should already be disabled.) GL :3

The grass seems tall. And at first I thought that was bad, but I suppose no one is there to mow the grass in a robot apocalypse

I really like how this looks but you should add more materials to the ground like mud and such!

The grass makes it look so much better. Its coming together

Howdy. If you are going to get an asset from the store I would highly recommend Amplify Imposters. It can make any game object that you have on your map an imposter and will really improve the FPS to it. Basically it turns the 3D object into a 2D plane and can really improve performance. The object will still look 3D. And at good distances you wont be able to tell it is a 2D plane. Also make sure you lod everything. Either by getting a LOD generating asset or doing it manually in a 3D program. Lods really help in that department. Mantis LOD Editor - Professional Edition comes with a standalone program to lod objects. And makes it easy to lod things directly in the editor or in the standalone program. Lastly I would actually get Vegetation Studio it would really help with rendering grass and trees. But wait for when assets go on sale. Or get them through humble bundle. Having assets can actually make things go a lot better in the long run.

I think the tree shake looks better than the camera shake. Maybe try shaking it without moving the object origin (assuming the origin is the base of the tree) so it looks less like the tree is just shivering 'cause it's cold.

bro literally just discovered Frustum and Occlusion Culling (where he deletes grass that you don't see), and mixed it with World Streaming (where he generates parts of the map that matter to you, and de-renders the rest), all in one video. Good job :)

Ive heard compute shading is more performant it works 100x faster than cpu but more difficult to master .

You could definitely add some bushes and small twigs to make the game more visually appealing , also you can add trees variant colors

There are couple of things to do with grass but one is frustum culling with jobs and burst. The other is a little harder but effective. It is by writing a software rasterizer for grass and drawing it by yourself to the screen.

About instancing, obligatory: Your models are already sent to the GPU. The problem is just that issuing draw call is costly. Doing thousands of draw calls every frame is worse than doing one instanced call, even if they are rendering the same amount of geometry What you could've confused was a thing in OpenGL or older Direct3D where draw calls are actually blocking, like IO. Doing a draw call in those stops CPU from executing until the GPU acknowledges it finished work

I would test if a max cull distance for the individual grass instances would improve the performance even further. I read some people who advice you to use grass meshes with 2 polygons only. I wouldn't say that this is always the best option, as in some circumstances this can lead to quad overdraws very easily (if you heavily rely on the alpha texture and have a lot of unused space in your grass mesh), which decrease performance and you have a hard time giving your grass a wind animation which makes them much more alive and less static. I would recommend to use more polygons and model the grass so it kinda has the form of a single grass, and use a alphacut texture to make it look more detailed and use your uv space more efficiently. This way you can reduce quad overdraws. Then use LODs to reduce their polycount over distance. That's what i do with my grass in unreal, but i think that in unity it shouldn't make a big difference.

I agree the comments saying the grass should be a bit smaller. Either that or maybe you could make the robot a larger? Anyways, I am always excited to see improvements you make. Great job!

I like the new light level, I didn't notice anything really off about it. I also would add in culling if you haven't already, or making grass further away from you have a lower detail mesh (maybe just 3 vertices for the furthest grass before it stops being rendered)

Another great video

Looking great so far but you also need more variety in the grass / and trees different types taller and shorter grass

I'm in a similiar situation as you were xD. I'm making a game about fishing and defending your island from planes (yeah sounds weird ik xD). My terrain is also procedurally generated. Right now it looks ok but your video convinced me to add grass since it did really help your game so I think It'll work in mine too.

I would recommend adding fog. You could also make the skybox brighter and make the grass less saturated.

Keep up the good work theses are so good im also Ben making a survival game a lot like this but more breath of the wild but anime

Besides chunks, add if something is behind a certain degree from where the camera as facing, that it isn't displayed!

If your thanking on making a terain editing tool or something alike the you should to that soon because it's going to be very hard implement that in the future.

the actual best way you could've done the grass so it does lag is to code it so it makes one BIG object that covers the whole land and so the GPU only needs to take care of one ( code it so it ray traces the whole map and finds the exact angle and depth the grass needs and join all the grass objects together )

I would look into crafting an auto material with multiple grass types, dirt, rocks sand, underwater coral, seaweed and even bushes and ground clutter and based off of predetermined height and slope it will apply the correct material and meshes to your landscape. I have created quite a few for unreal I haven't used Unity in awhile but I'm fairly certain this is possible there as well. It takes a bit of time to set up and tweak to our liking but it will drastically help speed things up when prototyping new levels in the future.

You can use raycasts and/or colliders to stop the items from appearing from afar and through the ground.

For game optimization you might want to try altering the grass density bases on distance from the player. An area that’s far away but still in a loaded chunk doesn’t need to have as much grass to look convincing

For the grass personally, i think you should have 'patches' of grass in the chunks, instead of having 100% filled, see if you can lower the amount of grass anyways (maybe it improves framerate). And also perhaps make the grass a bit lower in height. With Mountains/hills, i think you should have some hils, and if you are planning on implementing mines/caves in your game then at least a couple mountains with caves in them would be a nice atmospheric change. (myb have loot chests in the "mountain caves")

The bright colors look so much better in my opinion

Rather than using an actual, modeled blade of grass, use a flat plane (you can use 2 flat planes in an X pattern for an even better looking result) with an alpha clipped/transparent grass texture. This allows you to have multiple blades of grass per grass instance since the blades are actually just a texture and keeps the poly count even lower than what you have here. As well, you can cover a larger area of terrain with one grass instance this way. This is how games have done it for years now, great examples being the elder scrolls oblivion/skyrim if you want a good example to study (oblivion especially has really dense grass despite being a game from 2006 this way).

Good job bro

Little Feedback: The flatter world is a 50/50 for me, I liked those mountains but the plains appear to ne nice too. One Part I dont like atm is the new shaking Animation. I think the old one where only the tree shakes was great, so you could change that back… also it is really annoying when the camera shakes all the time. You can do that at heavy attacks or earthquakes, Stuff that doesnt happen that often as punching trees. Another great Improvement was the sky, I really like the look of it. Keep the great work up, I really enjoy ur content

I think the mountains stand out for two reasons: 1) They have nothing on them (no grass makes sense for a mountain, but still looks naked. Maybe some rocks or pebbles?) 2) They are smooth. I think this is the bigger one. Mountains aren't smooth transitions from the world around them. They're steep and jagged, so the way the engine is currently set to blend terrain is detracting from it. Also misc feedback: I think the tree cutting (and maybe attack as well) attack speed should be made twice as fast (but half as strong). It looks sloooow right now. Also, faster attacks mean faster combat = more strafing opportunities = more engaging/skillful. Keep up the good work!

i think if you made the light from the sky warmer or changed the time of day to be closer to dawn/dusk that the feel would be much nicer. also you could not only chunk the grass, but allow chunks that are farther away to be lower res?

The grass looks beautiful!

I think you can improve the processing speed if you decrease the tesselation based on distance and make further away parts less dense. I had a similar issue to you where I needed grass in a low poly proc gen vr game I was working on and I modified some code I found online to work like this, and I went from sub 60 fps to well over 100 or more if I recall correctly.

Depends on what you're going for, but turning off the shadows on your grass and using SSAO ( screen space ambient occlusion) might look better

I think the game "pops" a lot more with brighter colors and lots of green vegetation. It adds a lot of juxtaposing visuals with the white robots in a way that adds clarity and makes the game look visually interesting.

removing the shadows from grass might help too. although i don’t know if the shadows are also gpu instanced.

Looks great, i like more hills, and maybe make the water look better

Game looks better nice job

I like the new skybox and the increased light

Instancing reduces draw calls, what’s described here sounds like batching geometry.

I find the new light caused by the new skybox better than the older

Since you mentioned Horizon and this video is largely about optimisation(like most game dev stuff really) it reminded me of that Horizon behind the scenes thing where you can see which chunks of the world are being rendered when the camera moves. It's here if you wanna see what I'm talking about. Horizon has like hour long developer videos about how they did their foiliage in general, like placement and design and how it's rendered and stuff, might give ideas for this even if you would be doing a much more basic version. /r/gaming/comments/7v85ff/heres_whats_happening_in_horizon_zero_dawn_every/

You should try maybe making the grass shorter and adding some bushes and/or small flowers, you could probably take some inspiration from @Codeer , their game looks similar to yours For example, fog

2:36 you can made it even lower poly like you can make it one polygon and it would still look good

I know this is an old video but just wanted to say this. Sometimes spending a lot of money on an expensive asset is definitely worth it. For example: Early in my development I would take a few hours every other day to create a third person template thats able to climb ladders, edges, and various other objects. That took me 2 months to complete. If I worked 50 hrs on that system over the course of 2 months that's equivalent $1,000 of potential income lost. Or just 50hrs of playing video games with the boyz and my friends lost. But years later (now). I just bought a third person controller for $50 on sale. It has almost 50X more features and even a UI interface for modular character creation. Spending 1 week studying that asset I know how to write dozens of my own versions of various features now. So sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and buy a quality asset.

When an item is on the ground, you should remove the grass around it. It would make it easier to see. The outline shader would still be helpful, but maybe when you get closer it will fade out so you don't only see the outline and will be able to see the object on the ground.

For the most part i agree the terrain should be flat but it would be really awesome to have a massive mountain like mount chilliad on GTA5

I am sure the percent in the title is from a deep mathematical equation

I remember dealing with grass... it's even more fun when I wanted to upgrade my project to hdrp and they don't support grass in hdrp the same way built in does.. smh so all my grass broke. Had to re add the bilboards as meshss as "trees" I think support is better these days though.

I think a bit of fog would help the look a lot as well as hide the grass popping in and out.

I have to say, the brighter Version sure suits the Game a lot more! The Style in which everything is rendered suits the more poppy colour you get from the new Skybox! I'd keep it. Makes it a lot more Cartoony.

I think its nice keep going

Cypress trees. They are unusual, but cool