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:<\/p>\n
You can see a video on YouTube here<\/a>. 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…<\/p>\n For instance, while working on the light switches I was trying to find out how to access culling-masks\/layers via script, I came across numerous examples that look like this:<\/p>\n If, like me, you’ve never heard of a bitwise operator how do you go about deciphering the above? Googling <<<\/strong><\/a> isn’t even slightly helpful so it comes down to looking though forum posts for clues and relevant terms before piecing together a solution. Eventually I established that Unity references its layers as bits in a 32-bit integer, so in a list of 0’s, each one representing a layer, a 1 indicates a layer is active, essentially it’s a series of check boxes with a 1 instead of an x. In order to convert the layer number you see in Unity to this format it has to be bitshifted, with the help of Wikipedia<\/a> I learn that that’s what the <<<\/strong> does, and the |<\/strong> is an or<\/em> operator. The above code essentially checks the visibility box for layers 8 and 9.<\/p>\n This may seem like a ridiculous way of learning how to develop a game, stopping and starting constantly, and I certainly find it very frustrating at times, but to be honest I don’t think I could do it any other way. This goes back to my previous entry<\/a> about the context of learning; if I’d been taught this in a CS101 class I would’ve fallen asleep. In this case I wanted to stop the moon from lighting up the kitchen when I switched the light on, this is just the convoluted way the software makes me do that and, as a 3D artist, if there’s one thing I’m comfortable with it’s convoluted solutions to straight forward problems.<\/p>\n As for the rest of the scene, I’m slowly pushing towards a look I like, still aiming for something like a vector illustration, at the moment I’m using a combination of Unity’s built-in Lighted Toon Shader with a few different constant ramps, the Basic Toon Shader with a cube map and several textures with shadows baked in Softimage. So far, after much trial and error I’m getting reasonably consistent results.<\/p>\n Next step now is to replicate the click-to-move and inventory system functionality of my last prototype<\/a>, only with an animated character. I had more than a few issues getting simple animated transforms working so it should be interesting to see how I get on with a whole hierarchy of bones and a skinned mesh. Really looking forward to trying out the new animation features in Unity 4<\/a>, until then I’ll be looking at Locomotion<\/a>, from what I can gather Mechanim wont be supporting quadrupeds from launch so I’ll need to get to grips with the latter anyway.<\/p>\n If you have questions, suggestions or happen to know where I can get cheap, brand-name clothing, feel free to leave your words in the box below.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[43,64,58,18,76,57,59],"class_list":["post-1661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-development","tag-3d","tag-dev-diary","tag-scripting","tag-softimage","tag-toryanse","tag-unity","tag-unityscript"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1661"}],"version-history":[{"count":65,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4054,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1661\/revisions\/4054"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
var<\/span> cullingMask = 1<\/span><<8<\/span>|1<\/span><<9<\/span>;<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n