Level Editor and Camera Improvements news

Hey everyone, this week I fixed some issues and added some new features. Sounds exciting right?

There were some issues with saving, loading, uploading and downloading levels which I fixed this week.
Now it's also possible to intuitively place a great variety of scenery objects, such as cliffs, rocks, ice chunks and trees onto the map.

(perhaps the selection of trees is a little too big? 😁)

A big issue the level editor still has is that it's currently not possible to select and move multiple objects at the same time. It's also not yet possible to group objects together...

I can honestly say the code for the level editor is a horrific Frankenstein composed of proprietary, open source and my own code of course (held together by duct tape).

But now that I think about it, perhaps a solution to group objects together wouldn't be as difficult to implement as I had initially imagined... This is why I love writing these devlogs. They help me look back into the past and to see the bigger picture. Let me add this to my task manager right away...

To capture more cinematic shots for my next trailer I modified my camera system to use Unity's Cinemachine. It enables me to easily capture very smooth dolly shots.
As an added bonus, now the RTS camera feels a lot better to move around as well.

The last thing I started working on this week was a visual debugging tool for my quadrant system.
The quadrant system is responsible for segmenting units into square areas to keep performance high.

I'm implementing this visualization because unit targeting is not yet reliable and I believe it has something to with the quadrant system. Debugging this issue without visualization helpers would be extremely difficult.

Funnily enough, drawing simple shapes with the default Unity tools is extremely inefficient and tanked the framerate down to about 10 FPS. The best way to render the debug shapes I found was to create a mesh for each shape (including all the digits) and rendering them in batches.
I know this seems silly, but it's actually a common methodology among Unity game developers.

This morning I was surprised when I got a reminder that the submission deadlines of two digital expos are today. I quickly filled out the forms and now all that's left to do is to hope for the best: Day of the Devs, OTK Games Expo

That's all folks. Don't forget to wishlist Assembly RTS - Unleash Your Forces on Steam if you haven't already.