Cloud Killer Devlog #9

This week we’re introducing a new grass system to the Borderlands level. The level provided several challenges to spawning grass considering it uses meshes and not Unity’s built in terrain, so scattering foliage would need to be done manually. We have made a performance friendly scattering system which places a GPU instanced prefab over a texture mask. The texture mask used is based on the model’s UV map. The white parts are where the selected prefabs will spawn and the black parts are where spawning is disabled.

The GPU instancing of the mesh should substantially increase performance, and is a part of our optimisation initiative to allow the game to run smoothly on older hardware.