Overview

I'm working on a top-down scifi survival horror solo project and running into a wall. I need to find some way to build a modular, top-down character system so that I can easily focus on quickly creating a lot of gear/equipment/character customization options without necessarily hand-drawing each frame for resulting animations.

The perspective I'm working with is "Pseudo top-down" i.e. the entire character is visible and can move in all directions.

Context

• I'm using Aseprite for asset creation
• My characters are drawn on a 32x42 canvas
• Thus far all character pieces, hairstyles, clothing have been drawn and animated to fit over top of each other and be layered together.
• The game will be built on a 32x32 px "pixel-perfect" tile grid so my solution will need to support this.

Attempted Workflows

Thus far I've attempted two different workflows:

1. Hand drawing every frame for every animation in Aseprite. I don't mind to do it but it restricts my armor/clothing to be entire sets - which is not really what I'm after. Also, it's incredibly time consuming which would be fine if I could still maintain modularity.
2. Separate each piece of the character (arm, leg, torso, head) and rebuild the character in Unity - pretty much leaving me with built-in rigged 2d animation - which is pretty finicky and can be irritating to setup without importing PSB files and using Unity's built-in PSB file importer to set up/skin a character with multiple sprite libraries.
   1. Additionally, this animation style doesn't do well with movement toward/away from the camera. It's difficult to "sell" forward/backward movement with only 2d bones.

Solution?

Is there a workflow or something I'm missing? Surely I can't be the first to pursue something like this and I'm missing something?

Is it possible to build a 2d character rig at the appropriate scale and just assign sprites to each bone? Is it possible to do so and create decent looking movement animations in 4 directions? I'll attach a few images of a couple characters for context.

Thank you in advance for anybody who can offer insight/assistance!

https://i.redd.it/mbraicx53y1h1.gif

https://i.redd.it/dd3g1cx53y1h1.gif

https://reddit.com/link/1terual/video/uthdfwgjph1h1/player

If you need to take a look at the scripts just dm me : )

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on Unity shader warmup solutions for our open-world survival craft co-op game, currently being developed in Unity 6 (6.3.11).

https://preview.redd.it/dr50mdccwp0h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3a6c0fab5c0242e9604da99f3fd25dca530b403

We are currently stuck between a rock and a hard place regarding performance: we have massive FPS drops (stutters) when new shaders or areas are encountered, but our attempts to pre-warm them have caused even worse side effects.

The problems we are facing:

• Shader Variant Collections (SVC): This is our biggest bottleneck. They fail to prevent the "compilation hitching" during gameplay, and worse, they have bloated our loading screens to over 10 minutes. Also SVC's are not fully compatible with modern graphic API's like DX12.
• Pipeline State Objects (PSOs): While this is the intended modern solution, there is a known issue in Unity 6.3.11 that makes PSOs non-functional for our setup.
• The "Camera Method": We tried force-rendering variants using a secondary camera during loading, but it doesn't seem to stop the stutters once those shaders appear in the main view.

The Goal:

I need a way to effectively warm up shaders to prevent stutters without forcing players into a 10-minute loading screen. In an open-world co-op setting, these hitches are making the game unplayable.

Questions for the community:

1. How are you handling shader pre-compilation in Unity 6 given the current PSO bugs?
2. Are there ways to optimize SVCs to reduce those 10-minute load times while still actually preventing stutters?
3. Are there any custom-built or third-party solutions that handle asynchronous shader compilation more effectively for open-world environments?

You can check out the project here to see the scope we're working with:

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2354810/Elysium/

Any insights or technical workarounds would be a huge help. Thanks!

Hello everyone, I am new to the Unity engine and currently working on a project. I've encountered a challenge with the core logic of my project, and I would be very grateful if someone could offer guidance. If you are proficient in Unity, I would deeply appreciate your assistance with my project's core logic. \*\*My deadline for this project is in 72 hours\*\*, so any help would be greatly appreciated. We can connect eachother in discord and work together to solve my core logic.

Its placement logic uses snap points or something similar. I’m stuck on implementing a system for placing and stacking blocks like in Minecraft, but with my own prefabs made in Blender. Basically, I want the prefabs to stack perfectly on top of each other, just like stacking dirt blocks in Minecraft, while keeping every piece properly aligned and intact.