What's the tech?

It's about the right tech choice for the right purpose. As a solo developer, the whole scope of knowledge to handle every development topics can looks like a pile of icebergs.

The selected engine (Unity for this project) can miss some features that might need an important amount of work to be implemented. Hopefully, there is talented persons that makes these features possible through middle-ware, plugin or whatever forms .

I use them with no hesitation and that's a common practice.

First, targeting high fidelity

Using the Unity engine targeted to render in high definition is a big topic that does not suit to be discussed here (for our sanity, mine at least).  

I'm using / learning this engine for several years now. Enough, in my opinion, to have a good overview of what could be achievable in a realistic timeline, at least, for a hobbyist and solo game developer. My focus for a long time now is the HD render pipeline and all the stuff that can be used in good looking modern games.

A non exhaustive list of rendering features that the project use:

• Screen space ambiant occlusion,
• Custom Screen space global illumination
• Real time volumetric lighting,
• Subsurface scattering
• Real time shadowing,
• Refraction,
• Post processing effects
• ...

Whatever you, as a player, know about these rendering features, the thing to spot here is: they can contribute to make the image believable in a realistic way.

Targeting realistic water, an example

Thanks to the great looking water system created by kripto289. Screen space reflexion, dynamic waves, volumetric lighting, caustics and more, everything is real time.

The water in action

This scene has been captured in engine in real time at 4K resolution. It demonstrates the interactions between the water system, the player, the lighting, how the reflexion is looking... You can notice that the sounds hugely contribute to make the whole system immersive (this will be the next post).