LogInMore progress on Kacper Szwajka's Highland Keep.
For more than a year, we've been watching Highland Keep take shape, a survival strategy game set in medieval Scotland, where third-person combat meets RTS-style castle-building. The game is being developed by Kacper Szwajka, whom you might remember for his in-depth breakdown of GPU-accelerated real-time procedural terrain placement in Unity.
What makes this project particularly interesting is Kacper's use of custom solutions, such as a system that enables interaction with millions of scattered objects and a terrain renderer. Facing the 100-animator limit of Unity's built-in animation system, the developer decided to create his own. This system utilizes a Job-based pipeline, uint3 clip positions (skipping scales), support for up to 256-bone rigs, vertex weights packed into uint3, and a GPU-based renderer. Upcoming features include IK, frustum culling, and curve clips.
Kacper mentioned that the demo on top of the page currently runs at around 50 FPS. The main bottleneck is animation sampling on the CPU, which he's actively working to optimize.
The actual game likely won't have that many characters on screen at once due to design choices, so this is purely a showcase. Check out more Highland Keep updates below:
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