Rise of Dagon: Week of Nov 15, 2014

This week was a little low on productivity because Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition came out.

This was a really exciting development for me (and a lot of developers) so naturally I rushed out to download it the first night.

It ended up taking the full night to get installed and slowed my machine down a lot so I didn't get much done.

The next evening when I launched it said it was VS 2013 Express  .. which I though I had removed but I guess not?

So I had to remove that which took most of that evening, and then finally the next evening I reinstalled 2013 Community edition and now it is working properly.

So I thought I was set at that point but then I started experiencing Unity Editor crashes pretty frequently - which was not happening before.

So I swapped back to Monodevelop and the crashes are still happening.  So I started saving every 5 minutes .. which didn't work .. I actually had to make a change, quit Unity, and then load Unity to get anything to save.

Needless to say this was frustrating and very hard to be productive while this was going on.

In any case I persisted and got a few minor things done.

The first thing is I made some small improvements to my level loading code. I had previously implemented this loading with a fairly quick hack and found that it was not loading pillars that were not connected to walls so I went ahead and fixed that.

So the screenshot featured at the top shows a little section of room with freestanding pillars that I made to test that code fix.

Next up I was able to do a bit of work on some of the specular materials.. in Unity 5 beta I am using the new PBR default shader and I've found that something in the specular maps is causing some 'sparkly' artifacts to occur.

I was able to resolve this largely by going through the specular maps and using the Photoshop levels filter and make the whole thing darker by about 70%.

Then as needed in particular areas I did a select by color range and toned down other overly bright areas even further.

The takeaway I'm getting is that specular maps need to be much darker in general to look right in Unity 5 PBR mode!

Finally I was able to get some player targeting code done where I am able to find out which monster(s) are standing directly in front of the player so that when they press their default attack it will target whatever is in front of them.

This actually was tricky as I was using a physics collider box but it turns out (at least this is what I think) that I couldn't use the colliders when I a manually transforming the object around rather than letting physics do it.

I was able to figure this out eventually by reading the docs and swapped to a Physics.OverlapSphere as shown on the Unity docs and this did the trick!

So that was it for this week.

As an advance notice I am moving next Saturday so I will be skipping the update in favor of doing it the following week of Nov 29.

Thanks for reading, see you in two weeks!