Context: These blog posts are made in relation to a university assessment. Some of the answers are in response to questions asked in the assessment. 

Hello again. In this dev blog we will be discussing new advancements to our project and some of the challenges we had to overcome.

Using Unity's automatic LOD system

As the project grows so too does the amount of dynamic objects we have in our scene. Thanks to our simple stylised visual style we aren't worried too much about polycount however some objects require manual LOD's to preform better in scenes. I've personally never used Unity's LOD system before but after a simple tutorial I was able to setup easy LOD meshes for any object that transition based on camera distance. It's uncertain if the process of creating LOD's on certain objects really has much of a impact on performance for Obscurity but surely it doesn't take much time to create, given this fact I see it as a huge plus. 

Optimizing lightmaps using the progressive GPU lightmapper

Light baking it something I've never approached before in any game engine (shocking I know), so from the start of this project I had to learn everything about it. Its taken some good weeks to get going but I feel like I'm at the stage now where I have a very good understanding of light baking in unity and how I can fine tune gameobjects in the scene to be better optimized for baking. Unity has extensive documentation on the progressive GPU Lightmapper so it was easy to troubleshoot what exactly was going wrong. There are however some limitations to using light mapping instead of something dynamic. One of these fall backs is creating a dynamic day and night system. Perhaps using the adaptive probe system I might be able to create something however this is something I'm looking into, and will experiment in the coming weeks.