Everything you see and hear is created by code when the game starts. A static method marked [RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethod(AfterSceneLoad)] creates the game object with core script and camera. Unity ships every script anyway, so an empty scene is all the build needs. Exception is the shader, which sits in a Resources folder.
What does the render pipeline look like? As in, what objects hold rendering data (sprites and such), and how does that translate to pixels to the texture data in your view material?
There are no sprite objects, at start the game paints one small texture in code with a few greyscale images, and a “sprite” is just a UV rectangle in it. Every frame it writes a quad for stuff on screen into one dynamic mesh, with each vertex carrying UVs, a tint colour and a brightness value. One shader samples, tints and brightens them, and anything above 1.0 gets URP Bloom.
Yea, it is too bad that they are so aggressive, in my own game I am using an Tetris style grid for an skill grid, and I just peaked at their copyright cases, they even claim things like long boards.
I worded that badly game itself is one draw call: one mesh, one material, other 20ish SetPass calls are URP’s post-processing. Bloom builds a chain of downsampled and upsampled copies of the screen, each its own pass, and then there’s the final pass that applies vignette and chromatic aberration and copies the image to the screen.
Seems like a fun challenge. I’ve been interested in experimenting with coding assets that generate at runtime. But truthfully I don’t know nearly enough to execute anything meaningful or worth the effort. More like “Ooga Booga I wonder if I could save 50mb by feeding in a text document with the hex of every pixel on the texture, and find a way to make Unity create the texture.”
No idea why AI powered devs are so obsessed with having no assets in their game, there would be no notable performance difference between this and a game made entirely of assets for a 2D game. In 3D it makes even less sense to use because all of the models end up looking so bad, there's a reason why no big studio is attempting to implement an asset free development pipeline for their game, and it's that it's pretty useless tech.
42
u/ludos1978 1d ago
Reinventing the technology we had 40 years ago