Friday, April 14, 2017

TOE week 33: My BIG week.



It was a huge week for me. Mainly art stuff: 






Why was it such a big week? My wife was on spring break and she did most if not all of the baby work. I don’t know if readers can fathom what not having a 9-5 feels like for a person who wants to have a 9-5. So probably the best gift from my wife to me was giving me a work week. So I actually got to sit down and put in the work. There were some minor breaks but overall like a vet trip but I think I actually got near 40 hours in.

Yesterday I was trying to make the artwork work. Again it is one thing to make the artwork programming it to function is another matter. Unity is great and all but sometimes the documentation is lacking. What I had done is created a hitbox that when struck flipped a flag between true and false. Pretty easy. Then I wanted the gate’s render texture to appear if true and disappear if false. I Googled how to C# the mesh renderer and got all kinds of answers for Untiy 4… The syntax is now completely different in Untiy 5. I then banged my head against the keyboard until pretty much nothing happened. So I did the smart thing and gave up. No seriously sometimes walking away from a problem for a time will allow you to come back with a different perspective. 

I then went back to painting and made the on and off artwork for my strikebox so you can tell if it is on or off. Then I realized that I needed the mesh renderer problem to be solved for this to actually work. So I sighed and went back to trying to figure out the syntax. Again I tried different things that I thought should work and again no avail. It was at this point that I made end caps for my cliff faces because I didn’t know what else to do. 



When I finished the cliff caps I then again went back to it and for whatever reason I saw it… I was missing the () on the get component call. I believe it was because I found a response on a forum that was said if you and using Unity 4 it is this, if you are using 5 it is this. Then I saw what I was missing and it was the syntax. The BEST part is that I hooked it onto the render texture and it didn’t even work right! I mean it works as intended but from and art perspective it is wrong. Fortunately the strike box that also needed this it works perfectly on. 


It will be hard to have a week as productive as the last one. But we are moving closer and closer to the goal of this being a game. Right now it kind of appears to be one.
 

2 comments:

  1. Awesome. If it "kind of appears to be one" then by definition it is in the act of BECOMING. When I did a lot of programming I had many of those times looking for some elusive problem to end up finding some TEENY piece of "punctuation" missing from the syntax of a statement or having it where there should not be one. It's frustrating for sure but it's a part of the job apparently. Glad you had a productive week.

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  2. Slowly but surely it is becoming one. The main issue I was having with the syntax is that Unity changed a bit with the transition from 4 to 5. So I would Google how to write this Get Component Call and all of the helpful stuff applied to Unity 4 and that didn't help me very much. I couldn't find an answer for 5 very easily. I also learned about the power of walking away from a problem. Instead of dragging your face across it. But yeah there have been various times when I used a : instead of a ; and that made the compiler sad. Or various other almost invisible 'punctuation' errors.

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