March was another crazy month for TLG! Here is the recap!

I migrated all remaining UI to UI Toolkit, improved all menus, added a lot of performance related settings and a pause menu, improved in-game panels, added a loading screen with tips, redesigned the bottom bar during the game and reorganized the strategic actions into groups. Also started working on the minimap and added sounds to UI elements (and music to the menus and during the game)

Added two new units, the MA19 Templar self propelled artillery vehicle, and the MA-LT infantry transport unit.

I worked a bit on the day/night cycle and sun/moon movements so that I can include it in the alpha. Also made the nights shorter, so it's about 75% daylight and 25% night time. Made some improvements to exposure handling and tracer bullets to make night combat really cool.

I also experimented with volumetric clouds and particles. The clouds look really cool and make aerial combat very exciting, but using those deault Unity HDRP volumetric clouds is a bit performance intensive so I will probably make my own solution or only enable them in Ultra settings or with a separate checkbox in the graphics settings.
My custom solution for volumetric smoke and dust works more efficiently than the crappy billboard style particles most games use (and TLG is currently using), so I will probably replace all my particles with those soon, and maybe try to do a similar thing for the clouds too.

You can see the difference on a smoke column between the old system (left) and the new volumetric system (right). Lighting is much better and looks like a 3D smoke column instea of a flat thing.

Continuing the work from the last couple months, I implemented a new pathfinding algorithm based on Polyanya, which runs on the new navmeshes I am generating for different unit sizes. This allows units to navigate much more complex situations finding a path on a dynamically changing environment.

I added some more features to rockets and missiles so they can have a propulstion start delay and they run out of fuel after some time, also improved the charges that artillery uses to launch those rockets and projectiles in the case of howitzers, so that it's closer to a "charge 1" which matches the sizes and ranges of the islands better (around 4km to 25km depending on shooting angles).

I improved objects fracturing so the calculation correctly accounts for the mass difference and speeds of both moving objects, and added fractured versions for jets so they can be broken apart by projectiles or crashing into something.

Besides the smoke/dust volumetric test that uses a single pass and is much more efficient on the GPU when there are a ton of particles, I also worked on optimizing CPU usage on 3 different system, getting pretty good wins on that front too.

I uploaded alpha versions for Windows, MacOS and Linux to Steam and they got approved, so I already gave keys to my wife and some friends to start testing on different devices and start gathering performance insights and finding any crashes or bugs that need fixing before expanding the alpha to more players hopefully at the end of April.

On March 15th it was the 3rd anniversary since I started developing The Last General I made a little video summarizing all the progress since day 1 (see it below). TLG also reached 118.000 wishlists on Steam and 200.000 Youtube subscribers this month!