Kaiju Survivor 0.4.0a, Performance Pickup System with DOTS

Welcome to Kaiju Survivor 0.4.0a Performance Pickups,

The Voting of the MechJam IV - itch.io has ended. We thank all Creators and Players for the Feedback we have received and started immediately with working on the Game again and now we gonna bring you the first Update.

The Main Focus actually is the Performance, as we're planning to add more Weapons, more Enemies, more more of everything, everything needs to run as fast as possible.  In this Update we are going over the Pickup System and change it from a MonoBehaviour System to Unity DOTS.

The result after transfering it to DOTS was amazing. With basicially the same Behaviour, we can now manage more then 10.000 3D Pickups in the Game at any Time without loosing Performance.

The System is running so fast, we could spawn per Second 1000 Pickups and Collect per Second 1000 Pickups without any performance breakdown.

We also take over the first Bugs you the players and we have discovered.

Changes for Kaiju Alpha 0.4.0a

------------------------------

We're changing temporarily the Enemies Models to "Chickens" Those Chickens have around 500 Polygons which is the Amount of Polygons we are aiming for our end models.

Whats New

• FPS and CPU Counter (there will be an Option in next Version to turn it on or off, as it cost Performance to run it)
• Destructables have now a 3D Chest Model that spawns a random Pickup.
• The Spawn System for Enemies are now working with the GameCore for a better Simulation and conistenst Random Spawn around the Player outside the Visionrange.

New Performance Pickup System:

• We have changed the Pickup System from MonoBehaviour to Untiy DOTS so we can handle thousand of pickups at the same time to give you an intense experience of growing and collecting Stuff.
• Pickups have now a 3D Model and look forward to implement more matching looking Models in the future.
• New Pickup, "Magnet" will be added to the Game, this Magnet once spawned will pull all Pickups to the Player and Collect them.
• New Pickup, "Speed Boost" will be added to the Game, this Speed Boost increases your Walking speed by 25% for 30 seconds.
• New Pickup, "Expert" will be added to the Game, this Expert will double the Experience you receive for 30 seconds.

The Pickup Models are not Final and are subject to Change

Balancing

• We Changed the Player Speed from 5 to 6 and the walking Animation Speed to 0.9

Bug Fixes

• The Map Modifier, "Those Who Control the Machine" is now Working
• Enemy Death Effect will be Instantiated (Pooled) now correctly and show the Full Effect again
• Enemy Death Sound has now a higher Volume and should be heard now
• We adjusted the Button Sounds Volume down, as they were to loud
• The Level can now be restarted
• When going from Pause back to Main Menu the Game will no longer freeze
• The Models (Starting Small) will no longer grow forever, we have added a Limitation to the Size.
• The Models will grow slower over time.
• We Changed some Build Settings and hope that the game will now starting without issues, as recently some player experienced that they have to download it twice before they could start up the Project. (keep us updated if the problem still occurs)

Testing

We increase the Enemy amount to Spawn now up to 100 Enemies at the same Time with Animations.

With our recent Changes we gonna take a step closer to our Goal of +300 Enemies running towards the Player to destroy him at any time.

We encountered once that when you collect the Magnet and other Magnets get collected it runs into an Loop, if you encounter this Bug, please reach out to us so we gonna take a look again as we could not reproduce that issue.

Development Issues

While transforming the Pickup System to Unity Dots we had an issue which we still not resolved fully, but we found a workaround for now and would love to know what exactly is the problem. There is a Unity Forum Thread about the Issue:  https://forum.unity.com/threads/when-entitymanager-instantiate-all-existing-enti...

For Short, we're trying to move the Pickups to the Player with the LocalToWorld and we Schedule a 

transform = new LocalToWorld
            {
                Value = float4x4.TRS(
                    transform.Position + movement,
                    transform.Rotation,
                    1)
            };

BUt for some reason whenever we kill an Enemy all the PickupComponents get reset to their origin Position which we don't fully understand yet as we have the exact System in another Project and there it is working as intendent.

Not working in Kaiju Survivor

Working in another Project:

So, for now we found a workaround and will continue to improve the Pickup System.

Whats Next

With the improved Pickup System we created a solid Base to get more Game Systems to Unity DOTS. While we polished the Pickup System we  identified some more potential to optimize it in the future if necessary. So we still have room for improvement.

• Improving Weapons
• Different Weapon Types
• Adding Visuals to the Projectiles
• Bringing the Projectile System to Unity DOTS to get more Projectiles on the Field and ramp up the intense of the Game.

• Adding Battery Ultimates to the Game

With additional Weapons there will be new Cards and also new Abilities to Unlock. We also gonna work on the first Equipment Parts for the Mech to give more Upgrade capabilities.