TaleSpire Dev Log 353

Heya folks,

Today has been rather scattershot.

I started looking at how stencil buffers work in Unity. I was making progress when I was reminded of this bug which is causing game crashes on Windows 11 after 5 minutes of building.

I wanted to investigate, but I use Windows 10, so I broke out the VM. Of course, the Microsoft-provided VM had expired, so I download a new VirtualBox image. This worked, but I was not able to replicate the issue. Also, VirtualBox on windows does not support GPU passthrough, so I knew I could be missing something.
So I pulled the Hyper-B version. Hyper-V also does not support GPU passthrough on Windows 10 hosts but does support GPU partitioning. So I got working setting up that. I found this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLLcc29EZ_8

But I would recommend two changes if you want to use it yourself:
- In powershell, when he sets execution to unrestricted you should instead use `set-executionpolicy remotesigned`
- I was using the Windows 11 dev image from Microsoft. For that I needed to use the default network adapter, the external switch thing did not work for me.

With that, I had a VM that could use the GPU, so the performance was definitely better. However, it still would not crash. I was building for 10 minutes and then left it running for three hours without issue. This sucks as I think we will need logs from someone with the bug to be able to continue this.

I spent some time yesterday and a little of today researching localization. We need to translate the game, but we have not enjoyed the Unity library we have tried[0]. My research was mainly around tools used by translators and what kind of file format would work well if we did something custom. We'd like to avoid that, so we've purchased a popular plugin to evaluate. Beyond the basics, we need to make sure we aren't locked in and that our community will be able to make translations for not just the core game but also each other's mods.

I've also been prodding the macOS build. The pixel-picker has bit-rotted as expected, but that is ok as I'm currently just identifying issues and getting them into the bug tracker. This will give us a clearer path to release. I'm also in the middle of stripping down a copy of the TaleSpire repo to create a minimal case for a shader issue I have seen there. I'm hoping that will give us an easier time fixing it.

The above wasn't even half the day, but it's enough for today's log :)

I'll be back on Sunday with another.

Peace.

[0] It uses addressables which have been a general pain in the arse.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn't reflect everything going on with the team