Buckeled down and got the player shader migrated, it was hell, but I got it done.

I was overestimating the gains I was going to get from the High definition render pipeline. I'm gritting my teeth right now trying  not to say anything too inflamitory, but suffice to say the HDRP did NOT meet expectations. I could write an entire f*CKIGN book on why these tools are difficult to use, and poorly implemented, from a user friendly standpoint, to just sheer functionality. Across the board these tools are an abject faillure, and I'm a bit frustrated more people don't talk about them so people know better than to try to build an actual game with them.

To be fair, if you were making a very atmospheric game that didn't use shaders for anything outside of fancy looking glowy things in a natural setting, I could see these tools being really cool. But I've really pushed the limits of these existing shaders and everything is very pricariously held together, and any major adjustments and the whole thing falls apart, the fog, the emmisions, the sortings, the lighting, it's all been built up slowly over years and migrating to a new system was like taking a sledge hammer and just smashing it apart.

I spent a long time blathering online today in the Unity forums and some delicate forum mods decided to take my post down. I'm so tired of being silenced in this crazy world. But it is what it is, everyone is so darned easily offended these days as everything falls apart.

It was a very costly day. I lost a lot of motivation, and really threw myself at the project hard hoping to get some big gains, but it was like trying to get some blood from a stone.

I did get this beauty shot, of what might have been has things gone better:

But this motivated me to see what sort of results I could get with the current pipeline:And they're not bad!

Working with shaders and HDRP was a big rabbits hole. I guess i'm glad I at least attempted it, but a lot of gumption got lost down that hole as well. I'm kind of inspired by the muted color schemes. Think i'm going to spend  some time setting up materials soon and dialing down the noisy diffuses and letting the normal maps shine through.