Sunday, September 18, 2016

TOE week 15: Parallelogram solution.



                There are monsters under the bed. It might be a good thing that I didn’t try to paint things last week… I found out this week that I’m not yet to painting. I tried to set up art for the slopes I currently have and my God WTFBQQ attack. I have 14 different ground pieces of collision. I was only trying to deal with 7 of them. The ground pieces I’m ignoring the ceiling. It was an unmitigated nightmare. A 22.5 angled piece fits with a 0 angled piece like this but when you try attaching it to a 45 degree piece it no longer works in the same way. Oh and the 0 degrees line up when they are below angled pieces but fail to work in any way whatsoever if they are higher than the angled ones.

                I was hoping to make a simple snapping system too. Where everything collision is on a grid and if you use the Pythagorean Theorem the collision will all line up. Yeah that didn’t work. I thought math was supposed to help me! It didn’t work out the way math is supposed to. Three, Four, Five, right angle? Nope! 

                Fine! I got out an exacto knife and some card stock. Cut out little rectangles 1x3 and placed them at 22.5 and 45 to see just how these damn things are supposed to connect to each other. Like I’m laying on the floor moving card stock around and if my wife asks me what I’m doing my answer was going to be ‘I’m working on the game’. Card stock didn’t seem to cut it so I switched over to photoshop. Photoshop does something really easily that no other 3d editor (excluding XSI) even does. Moving the COG or pivot point is SO easy in Photoshop. I don’t get why it is such a pain or impossible in other editors. But even my Photoshop powers couldn’t help me. 

Side bar NESTED or grouped objects in Unity is not good. Bad Unity! Be better at this!

                I was having so much trouble trying to do this stupid thing that I couldn’t even explain what the problem was to my wife. I mean I don’t even know what this problem is called. Grid based collision? She came over put her head on my shoulder and said. “Oh I see what the problem is now.” We talked about it and she then understood my struggles. She was feeding our son and said something that might be the brilliant solution. “Could you just make everything that is at an angle a parallelogram?” Not having had the Bobby Fisher moment I said “No Unity doesn’t do that….. But Blender does.” I sat there thinking about spacial relationships eyes moving back and forth in a 3D world not our own. Zero to 22.5 check, Zero to 45 check, 22.5 to 45 check,  90 to 22.5 doesn’t quite work as planned and same with 90 to 45 but IT does WORK as far as collision is concerned.  

                I didn’t have the time to create all of the parallelograms to test if this ACTUALLY works. But I did test something that I wasn’t sure would work. I slapped down a cylinder in the level to see if my Ray Casting system would let my Player smoothly walk up and down a circle. And damn it is a fine thing to watch when something complicated works out completely as you think it should work in programming. That right has the rarity of a Unicorn. So I learned that my code allows for this and I didn’t even know it was capable of it. Like I can make arched stone bridges with this and that is pretty cool.

                Was this a good week? NOT REMOTELY. Nothing freaking worked! Did I learn some cool things? I am definitely smarter now about possible solutions and the capacity of my code. Did I get to paint? Nothing but test art. I have yet to try to implement the parallelogram solution. I mean looking at it in my head it ‘should’ work but I thought my original solution ‘worked’ in my head. Turns out the pictures in my head were ‘wrong’. I will update next week on just how well parallelograms either kicked my ass or saved my life. To be continued, game over, insert quarter. 

 

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