It dawned on me randomly that SeaCrit could look a hell of a lot better in the stand alone builds if I migrate to the HDRP, don't know why I never considered this before.

Subsequent thoughts formed around if this was feasible, and how easy it would be to swap between these render pipelines.

I have decided to bite the bullet, and fully migrate full steam ahead towards the HDRP. This will require a total revamp of most all shaders and materials, and I will be refactoring them one by one to be contained within function nodes.

For parity, it means I will be transitioning from Amplify shader which has been a fantastic tool after all these years to Shader Graph the not quite as easy to use plugin for Unity, but this tool will have internal support from Unity and it just makes sense to migrate to in house tools and cut down on the bloat of using multiple tools and GREATLY reduce the # of graphical issues that I will be running to across multiple render pipelines.

I'm hesitating, but ALL of this is spring cleaning that should have been done ages ago, so I'm going to look at this as doing some tidying up that is sorely needed, while also getting a huge graphical shot in the arm that will improve every visual aspect of the game ranging from post procecssing effects, ambient occlusion, lighting, anti aliasing, shaders, materials, the whole shebang should be looking nicer soon. I'm really curious how the game is going to look like once it's migrated to a fancy new render pipeline. It could be HUGE for promo materials and just general excitement.

I still remember an email I got from a potential publisher years back where they remarked that the graphics weren't very good. For a game that runs as well as it does on phones, I think SeaCrit looks fantastic, but that doesn't matter. What matters at this stage of development is that the game looks snazzy as possible. It's also important that I'm able to create web builds from time to time that are updated with current gameplay adjustments.

So the next day or two will be major refactoring of all the shaders and materials that I started months back when I thought the migration would solve the infamous performance bug, but did not. So I quit halfway through and now I've got some shaders and materials that are shader graph, and some that are amplify shader.

I'm hesitant to break away and work on other tertiary things when dev is going so well, but I'm also very burned out on code and level design and could use a break getting work done elsewhere, and it's very rare to have the potential to have such huge games for just a bit of work. If this goes well, SeaCrit will look like a big fancy triple A game in the next few days. And it opens the possibility of using fancy new things like volumetric fog and clouds for the water and sky and water surface effects. Lots of toys to play with! Hopefully don't get too distracted and get back  to making the core soon!

Excited to see what the results will be soon.

THE BIG task is going to be migrating the fish shader to shader graph, it's a doozy. But it's worth it. I'm going to start with that and everything will be downhill from there.