[MOD] l3lessed Enchanted Compass

[l3lessed]

3.8 is up.

I apologize if you noticed a large slow down in 3.7. This was a result of the materials and how they were being created/loaded. This should largely be remedied now. If it isn't, let me know.

[King of Worms]

Lovely, you are really doing great job here man. Big respect.

[l3lessed]

There is still a noticable drop on low end systems, especially systems not designed with GPU use in mind.

The previous builds were less fps intensive because my coding error caused all the building instances to use a single material, set once at creation with its color set on creation. This pulled all the mesh GPU calls into a single call under the one material shader setup on the main script file, but broke the ability to update individual building material colors after generation since there wasn't any shaders for the individual buildings.

The new code fixed this, as stated above, but in the process, it now has restored all the individual materials to the markers, with transparencies. As a result, the GPU calls are up again.

There is one last option I'll look into over time, and there are people saying you can create a shader, assign it to as many meshes as you want, and then just adjust the property of that individual mesh instance. I need to mess around some more with instancing or custom shader setup to try and pull these meshes back into a single gpu drawcall that only updates their color.

[l3lessed]

4.0 is coming sometime this week. I just finished creating a successful mesh combiner. I just need to apply it to each building marker type, and the minimap will go from having hundreds to thousands of submeshes and materials to 7 meshes and materials (one for each group type).

This should provide a large gain in FPS for everyone, but especially for low end systems that tend to skip on GPU memory and power.

4.0 should be the final major release. There is no more optimization to do at this point. CPU and GPU processes have been profiled, torn apart, and reduced to as few memory and cpu stores/calls as possible.

[l3lessed]

Okay, finished optimizing all the differing systems.

Everything has now been converted to simple quads that use a basic sprite shader and textures to free up as much memory and tris as possible.

Also, all meshes that can have been combined and any unneeded shaders/meshes are removed during this process.

Created custom shader for the mesh icons, so all mesh icons are combined under a single optimized mesh and the icon texture rotation is shader controlled itself.

All shaders that can be have been converted into a single instance and shared across any objects that use that same shader. Aka, same building types and npc types.

Number of other things, I can't remember.

It should drop by Friday.

[King of Worms]

Nice progress, good to see you back!

[l3lessed]

The one thing holding back the drop at this point is a weird bug I am encountering with the mod builder itself.

Anytime I try to build my mod as a dll, it says it failed. When I check the mod directories, it is clear the dll is not being created or saved during any of the process.

Any ideas what would cause this? I've setup a whole new DFU build with the newest build files and resetup my mod from scratch to recompile it, and I'm getting the same issue. Nothing I know of on my mod side changed that should cause this issue.

[BadLuckBurt]

The one thing holding back the drop at this point is a weird bug I am encountering with the mod builder itself.

Anytime I try to build my mod as a dll, it says it failed. When I check the mod directories, it is clear the dll is not being created or saved during any of the process.

Any ideas what would cause this? I've setup a whole new DFU build with the newest build files and resetup my mod from scratch to recompile it, and I'm getting the same issue. Nothing I know of on my mod side changed that should cause this issue.

What does the Unity console spit out as an error?

[l3lessed]

Okay finding the possible issue here.

Upon compile failure, this error is provided in the console:

error CS2001: Source file 'C:\Games\daggerfall-unity-master 13.4\Assets\s\com.unity.textmeshpro\Scripts\Runtime\TMP_FontAsset.cs' could not be found.
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError (object)

That file is added when I click "collect dependencies." Before my use of submesh and mesh combining, I could remove the file and have it still compile just fine. None of the mod code actually needed it, despite it being a collected dependency.

However, if I remove that file with my new mesh combiner code/optimization, I then get this error upon trying to compile.

Assets\Game\Mods\Minimap\Scripts\BuildingManager.cs(435,62): error CS0121: The call is ambiguous between the following methods or properties: 'Minimap.MeshExtension.GetSubmesh(UnityEngine.Mesh, int)' and 'Minimap.MeshExtension.GetSubmesh(UnityEngine.Mesh, int)'

This tells me the mesh combiner is needing the TMP_FontAsset.cs to run properly on the stand alone build. Any ideas on solutions?

Top of my head is to see if there is a way I can just package the TMP_FontAsset.cs file right into my mod and call it that way some how, but I don't think it works that way or is that easy. I'll keep at it, there has to be a solution to this.

[l3lessed]

Here is the exact code causing the error complaining about the ambiguous reference:

Code: Select all

                    MeshFilter markerMeshFilter;
                    markerMeshFilter = markerInstance.marker.attachedMesh.GetComponentInChildren<MeshFilter>();
                    Material[] buildingMaterials = markerMeshFilter.GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().materials;
                    for (int j = 0; j < buildingMaterials.Length; j++)
                    {
                        string textureName = buildingMaterials[j].name.Split(new char[] { ' ' })[0];
                        CombineInstance combineMarker = new CombineInstance();
                        switch (textureName)
                        {
                            case "markerMaterial":
                                Mesh NewMesh = markerInstance.marker.attachedMesh.GetComponentInChildren<MeshFilter>().mesh;
                                combineMarker.mesh = NewMesh.GetSubmesh(j);
                                combineMarker.transform = markerMeshFilter.transform.localToWorldMatrix;
                                combineMeshLister.Add(combineMarker);
                                break;
                        }
                    }

This line is the specific line causing the issue. It is the .GetSubmesh call that is complaining about the ambiguous reference.

Code: Select all

combineMarker.mesh = NewMesh.GetSubmesh(j);