5 takeaways from the V Rising PlayStation®5 port

Porting a PC-first game to consoles is no small feat, especially when it’s your first multiplatform game, and that game is as big as V Rising. To bring V Rising to PlayStation®5, Stunlock upgraded Unity versions, reoptimized the game’s code and assets, and implemented support for the console’s unique features, like PlayStation™Network Trophies and the DualSense™ wireless controller.

Read on for five key takeaways from Stunlock Studios’s experience porting one of the biggest Unity projects ever to the PlayStation®5.

Tip 1: Consider upgrade strategies in advance of submissions.

Stunlock kicked off V Rising’s console port with a Unity version update from 2020 to 2022 LTS. As early adopters of the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS), they were eager to jump in and start using Entities 1.0, which would unlock a host of performance optimization opportunities for V Rising’s PlayStation 5 and PC builds.

Over six months, the team rewrote V Rising’s authoring system from scratch, including around 1,000 IConvertGameObjectToEntity and 140 GameObjectConversionSystems. “Upgrading our Unity version and the ECS package to the latest versions was a big task, but it was necessary for us to support the platform and implement the improvements we needed for optimization,” says studio cofounder and technical director Rasmus Höök.

Takeaway: Thinking about launching on a closed platform like PlayStation®5? Consider factoring a version upgrade into your planning far ahead of certification so you can take full advantage of your target platform’s core features. It’s a time investment, but one that can put you ahead of the game – especially when a new console enters the market.

Tip 2: Project organization is key.

Being early adopters of the technology, Stunlock notes that working with DOTS did come with its own challenges, mostly related to navigating architectural changes between Entities 0.17, 0.5 ,and 1.0 releases. In the long run, though, the stack’s modular architecture ultimately simplified a lot of the work needed to bring V Rising to PlayStation®5. The team used the Entity Component System (ECS), Burst compiler, and C# Job System extensively to optimize V Rising so it felt at home on the console.

With DOTS, Stunlock could leverage subscenes and asset streaming to massively boost performance, and working with Entities greatly simplified debugging workflows. “We’ve been using the Entity Debugger heavily to see the contents of our ECS world, and being able to query for entities and see their individual states is very powerful”, says Rasmus. “We did the majority of our development pre-Entities 1.0. Now, having upgraded, we’re using journaling a lot to see what’s happening, which has also been very useful.”

Rasmus recommends leveraging the Burst compiler for code compilation wherever it makes sense, rather than leaving code in plain C# or IL2CPP. “We saw significant performance differences between IL2CPP code on PlayStation® versus desktop, and didn’t see these differences when we were using Bursted code,” he says. “A lot of what we did for the port was moving code into the Burst compiler, where it would perform much better. This is something we’re going to do moving forward, because it makes performance better on all platforms.”

Because V Rising had been limited by the main thread on the PC build, much of the port’s development efforts focused on refactoring main thread systems to run via Jobs. Safe scheduling helped the team easily create jobs on the main thread that didn’t interfere with other tasks.

The takeaway: Setting standards for your Unity projects early can save you a lot of headaches later. Unity offers several free e-books to help you streamline your development cycle, including Create a C# style guide: Write cleaner code that scales, Version control and project organization best practices, and, for DOTS-based projects, Introduction to the Data-Oriented Technology Stack for advanced Unity developers.

Tip 3: Don’t sleep on platform-specific dev tools.

Working on their first console game definitely shifted Stunlock’s PC-first mentality – and it’s not just about reaching more players. “Whether or not we choose to make a console game in the future, we’d still want to build for console just to use the tools!” says Rasmus. “The memory analyzer tools for PlayStation® were especially great.”

For V Rising’s PC build, Stunlock was using Unity’s native profiling tools in combination with Superluminal to identify performance bottlenecks, which worked well. The studio was pleased to find that adding Unity's PlayStation®-specific profiling tools to their workflows unlocked greater synergies for their debugging pipeline. “Unity's PlayStation® tools and built-in profiling tools provide different insights, so using them together can be incredibly effective," says Rasmus.

The takeaway: Even if your current game development pipeline is working well, experimenting with different tools, including native platform tools, can help you surface new information about your project that wasn’t previously apparent.

Tip 4: … And test new tools thoroughly before you commit.

Unity for PS5 gave Stunlock’s artists access to the NGGC graphics API, Unity's interface for the improved native PlayStation® graphics API. Stunlock was aware of NGGCs potential, but before going all-in, they wanted to experiment with the API. Switching over wouldn’t be a straightforward task, and they wanted to be sure the time investment was worth it.

Initial tests showed that NGGC did significantly improve performance on PlayStation®5, but was tied to a puzzling spike in GPU crashes. Technical artist, Filippa Arvidsson, began digging into the issue, and discovered that some of their custom systems for controlling material changes were unintentionally affecting VFX Graph renderers.

“For example, we have a boss that switches weapons multiple times during her boss fight. When she does this, the shadow casting mode on her weapon changes, which also unintentionally affected the VFX Graph effects on the weapon. This is because the VFX Graph effects internally inherit from the base renderer class,” Filippa explains. “In the regular Graphics API, this error is handled gracefully, so we never noticed it. But in NGGC, this leads to an erroneous state on the GPU which eventually leads to a crash.”

NGGC’s performance improvements were too good to pass up, so the team began working on a solution. “In the end we made sure to exclude any VFX Graph renderers from those systems – they weren’t supposed to be there anyway,” says Filippa. “NGGC is a gamechanger because of its positive performance implications, but I think it’s important for Unity devs who are building for PlayStation 5 to be aware of this issue.”

Despite the challenges, Höök emphasized that the benefits of NGGC vastly outweigh the drawbacks: “The performance difference was huge, and after fixing the crashes, it’s the way forward.”

The takeaway: Changing from Unity’s default graphics API to one that’s purpose-built for your target platform is literally a few clicks, and can unlock major performance numerous benefits, but it requires careful handling.

Tip 5: Make the most of your target platform’s unique features.

Implementing support for the DualSense™ controller gave Stunlock opportunities to add new dimensions to V Rising’s gameplay. Haptic feedback gives combat more visceral impact, while controller sound effects immerse players while providing important gameplay information (like making it more obvious when the player-character is lingering too long in the sun). Players can even squeeze the DualSense™ Adaptive Triggers to control the flow of blood as they exsanguinate their victims.

Many of these creative new features were made available to players on the PC version of V Rising by including the DualSense™ dynamic-link library in their PC build, in conjunction with Unity’s Input System. This added controller support in an update not long after the 1.0 release on Steam. These features have even made converts of the keyboard-and-mouse diehards at Stunlock: “Most of us have been PC players from the beginning, so we’ve always focused on keyboard and mouse,” says Rasmus. “A lot more players use gamepads – even I find myself sitting on the couch and playing!”

Another feature they implemented, one that’s shown to improve player stickiness, were platform Trophies. V Rising launched on PlayStation®5 with 44 Trophies, which in turn inspired a collection of Steam Achievements on PC. These systems have contributed to high engagement metrics for the studio: players spend an average of 35 hours in V Rising, and have unlocked more than 3.4 million PlayStation™Network Trophies and Steam Achievements to date.

The takeaway: Building for a new platform can spark new ideas for features and gameplay improvements, including those that are platform or hardware specific. Many of these can end up benefiting your wider playerbase and deepen their engagement with your game. When done right, it can also increase replayability.

Lessons learned, and a look ahead

V Rising’s PlayStation®5 launch shows that even established teams like Stunlock Studios are constantly innovating to stay successful. Taking on the challenge of a console launch taught the team valuable lessons in project planning and setup, research and development, and performance optimization – learnings they can apply to future projects.

Stunlock is currently evaluating how they might leverage features on the latest addition to the PlayStation®5 family, the PlayStation®5 Pro, to deliver an enhanced version of V Rising to players in the future. “We’re very excited about the potential of the PlayStation®5 Pro,” says Rasmus. “We plan to explore enhancements such as increased rendering resolution and improved visual fidelity. These are the first areas we plan to dive into to leverage the increased graphics power of the new hardware.”

And as for other platforms? V Rising players will have to wait and see. “This was our first multi-platform launch, and with that came a lot of challenges – both fun and difficult ones. However, given we’ve made V Rising with Unity, this will make building for other platforms much easier” says Rasmus. “With that in mind, we’ve been mainly focusing on bringing the best and full experience of V Rising to players on both PC and PlayStation®5. But it’s not impossible that it could be something we may look into in the future. The best way to find out is to stay up to date with news on V Rising and to read our dev blogs.”

Dive deeper on V Rising with our recent case study unpacking how Stunlock Studios leveraged DOTS and the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to build the game’s massive open world. Build for PlayStation®5 and other platforms with Unity Pro.

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