Pointing and Clicking…

As a few people have asked, I thought I’d share some notes about how I’m setting up my point-and-click interface with Playmaker. I’m pretty sure the Unity 4.2 update opened up NavMesh to Basic users but I don’t think the IK rig is accessible, I’m using that for its “look at” control so you’ll need Pro to recreate this setup completely. You’ll also need the custom actions for both Pathfinding and Mecanim…

There are several things I wanted the character to do in response to a click from the user:

  • look at where the click was made
  • turn to face that point
  • walk towards that point
  • upon arrival, complete an action of some kind

It would also be nice to have a method for stopping a walk before completion and for clicked items to have their own pre-defined destinations eg. clicking on a mountain could result in walking to a balcony to look rather than all the way to the mountain…

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Development Diary #4: Progress

The last couple of months have had a pretty steep learning curve but, at last, something vaguely game-like is beginning to take shape. This is what I’ve been working on:

  • Basic camera moves and cuts
  • Various types of animation control
  • Custom cursor with different animated rollover states
  • Real-time and baked shadows with toon-shading
  • Lightswitchs

You can see a video on YouTube here. Unsurprisingly, it’s still my lack of general scripting experience that’s slowing me up. All too often I find myself going online to “quickly” look up a reference, only to encounter basic terms I’ve never heard of and having to spend hours/days down tutorial filled rabbit-holes…

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Development Diary #2: First Steps

Stephen Fry had a TV-show on a while back called Planet Word, in one episode he met a computational linguist who tried to teach his son Klingon as his first language, the kid made pretty impressive progress right up to the point he realized he could, effectively, only use it to communicate with his dad, after that he completely lost interest. It makes sense, I guess, if you can’t see how what you’re learning is immediately benefiting you it makes it so much more difficult to stick with…

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