Unity 5.6 has finally been released, the final major release in the Unity 5 life-cycle! Hooray…right? Unfortunately not, very NOT hooray in fact.
Since Mythlink is still deep in development (with no real imminent release date) I do like to keep up to date on the latest patches and enhancements in all of the tools I use. Usually these upgrades come with a fair amount of rework that needs to be done, but so far none have been as bad as this upgrade. Nothing like firing up to work on the game only to be greeted with this:
That’s right. Nothing. Everything in my scene and game were gone. Turns out that awesome new rendering process I had mentioned a few posts back was now completely broken. After doing a bit of research I came to learn that the fantastic “Lab Renderer” was never planned to be officially supported by Valve and Unity just happens to be in the midst of overhauling it’s own rendering pipeline.
So now comes the bad news, I’m currently not talented/educated enough to get the new style rendering working on my own, so I have to reverse all the work I did to make it look oh-so-wonderful and go back to the old grainy style of things. I’m sure with a significant amount of time and effort I could get something at least passably working, but right now it’s not worth the time or effort when there is so much more gameplay-important things to work on. Graphics are nice, but ultimately the least important part of my game and even if I were to write something to fix it someone else smarter than me would just write a much more awesome wrapper anyway!
Funny enough, more than the graphics broke on this update, the VR motion controls also completely stopped tracking! This was luckily a much easier fix and just took a brief amount of searching. I do hope that by the time Mythlink is ready for release (est. 2019) someone will have a nice rendering option out there that I can use. In the meantime, I am grateful that I was able to push out the excelling-looking demo to Steam before this update screwed up everything I was doing.
Ahhhh…the joys of getting in early on new pieces of tech. Now, after this minor setback…let’s get to work on the Gym room!