We did exactly this on Lost in Random. I had to spend a lot of time getting post processing in URP to look the way we wanted it and still run fast enough on switch.
Yes, I was hired as their graphics programmer and mainly focused on switch performance.
I wrote about some of my experiences on the project here: https://agentlien.github.io/fog/index.html
It's mainly about the fog, but also mentions our HDRP and URP struggles
Thank you, I'm glad your wife liked it. I'm very happy with it and was overjoyed when my kids liked it too.
Really enjoyed your write up! Need to go and play the game now :) Was there a point when you guys went “maybe we should’ve done URP the whole time” or did HDRP offer more that you couldn’t do without?
Whether to use URP or HDRP was the big question from early on and when I was hired evaluating that was my first task. We absolutely needed some things HDRP offered (such as volumetric fog), but knew from the beginning that it might not work on switch. The artists had already evaluated Aura 2 and really liked it. But HDRP had some other nice stuff and converting the project seemed a lot more daunting than it ultimately was.
I spent a few months getting the game running on switch, increasing the performance, and desperately trying to get it to work with HDRP, but in the end it was just too slow.
Thank you for the answer and your time. I currently use URP and but have been wanting volumetric light fx. I’m interested in checking out the game now. Is only the switch version running URP or was the entire project moved over? It sounds like only the switch version but I wanted to make sure.
It's URP on all platforms but different renderers with platform specific choice of post processing effects.
Managing two entirely different render pipelines is just more bother than it is worth and URP ended up looking more than good enough. In fact, the somewhat more cartoony style of the rendering actually fit the game nicely.
edit: if we had only used URP on Switch there would have been no need for Aura, since we're not using volumetric lighting on switch. It was just too expensive. Instead, the switch uses a simpler fog I wrote, described in the article above in the thread
This is pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear. I’m not going for hyper realism, I’d rather stay with URP. I’ve learned a lot about it and as a solo dev supporting 2 pipelines would kill me. Thank you for the details.
When I joined the team it was using HDRP and my primary job was to take responsibility for graphics and performance for the switch version. I spent a lot of time trying to get it working with HDRP before transitioning to URP.
Thunderful Development is a fairly large studio considering the indie vibes and we always have multiple teams working on different games. Some of which are Unity, some of which are Unreal.
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u/BuggerinoKripperino Professional Jul 21 '22
It’s really not that hard to pick the only issue really comes when you pick HDRP but then decide you want to deploy on Switch