Frontiers - March Update about Textures

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Lars Simkins has posted another post-funding update for Frontiers with his next monthly development update where he talks textures and a few problems using Unity.

March Update - Case Study: Textures
Hello, everyone! Some of your suggestions for update topics back in February were:

• Architecture / iteration
• Multiplayer
• More tech stuff in general
• Interface
• Tools

I'm dealing with a problem right now that falls into the tools / tech stuff categories: Texture management. (This is exactly the kind of thing I would assume is too boring to write about, but hey you asked for it!)

Arg, Unity
Unity is a great tool. An amazing tool, really. But it has limitations. The biggest is that it assumes you'll be using 'levels' in your game. This doesn't rule out open world games, but if you were playing by their rules it would be something like Metro: Last Light where the world is carved up into discrete regions with maybe two or three entrance/exit points, plus loading screens in between them. You load a level and everything in it when you enter an area, then unload everything when you leave. Sure some minor stuff like enemies might spawn and despawn while you're there but the general rule is: load all the things / unload all the things. (Including any textures used in the level.)

FRONTIERS isn't like that. There aren't levels - there's just a world. I have exactly one 'level' that's loaded on startup. After that I load and unload individual objects - characters, rocks, terrain tiles - into whatever area the player needs to see.

This was the root of the problem I faced last year - how do I organize content so that I can load and unload it as I move through the world? How do I avoid loading too many objects at once, or too few? I came up with some decent solutions. It'll never be as seamless as a truly streaming open world like Grand Theft Auto, but it works.

Unfortunately this approach prevents also me from using a lot of Unity's built-in tools - stuff like pathfinding, occlusion culling and (apparently) texture memory management. (Note: I keep hedging when making statements about Unity's texture memory because the truth is, I have no idea what's going on under the hood, and no one else seems to either. Google this problem and all you'll find is lots of unanswered questions & educated guesses.)​