shaders

Not much to report today, between getting my car in for service and seeing off a former coworker, who is soon to be starting an exciting new gig of his own. I did experiment more with different surface shader options, and got vertex-colors working with the PBR lighting option (not hard). I'm running out of excuses before diving back into scenario design! That will be tomorrow, I think, hopefully including some level mockups in Blender.

movement model + asset import

Got some good things done today:
  1) Finished the code for a basic 3rd person movement model. It handles step-ups and edge sliding correctly. It should be very simple to extend to support "max walkable slope" and a "stick threshold" below which you just run into the wall and don't slide along it.
  2) Imported a walkable mesh from Blender into Unity. I created a simple platform and figured out how to get into Unity and make it have physics. I used Unity's default physics mesh generation, which may not always be ideal. A future step is to figure out a good authorial way to create a physics mesh in blender, based off the render mesh, and then import them together.
  3) Get a primitive surface shader working. I want to be able to use vertex painting to basic coloring, and for that I can't use the Standard shader, which doesn't support vertex colors as far as I can tell. I'm hopefully close to making this go, and in the process I think I'm going to be a lot that will be useful later.

movement model

Yesterday and today, spent some fun times playing with movement models and ideas for how to describe walkable areas in a game space.

environment art

Another day playing with environment art / trees.

environment art

For the last couple of days, I've been working on environment art, basically trying to build a small 3D level in Unity. It's slow-going, but I feel like I'm learning a lot. It's all a bit of a digression, but the idea is that it's going to teach me how to make a visualizer that could look good and be visually distinct, while still falling within the project's constraints. Also, I've learned a lot about Unity's tree-tool :-)

scenario design

Yesterday and today, continued plugging along on scenario design for my current concept. The idea is  a fairly simple graph manipulation puzzle, where you need to untangle a graph to remove all its cycles, dressed up in a narrative. But coming up with the right level of complexity for the underlying puzzle has been tricky, and I'm still working on it.

art, scenario design

Yesterday I spent mostly in blender, working on landscape tiles for a landscape system that I may not end up using. I learned (in some cases relearned) a bunch about how to basic box and extrusion modeling in blender, though.

Today I spent brainstorming more about exactly what I'm building. I feel more strongly about making some kind of "pet the sloth" experience, but a scenario that fits that limited scope, that would still be satisfying to build, is a pretty tight set of constraints. Toward the end of the day I hit on an idea I like, and I'm still notebook-scribbling on it.

viz+art

Another experimental day playing with art tools. I spent the morning trying to do perspective drawings of environment art in Krita, and the afternoon playing in Blender. It doesn't feel like I'm making much progress, but I think this phase is necessary. This is certainly one of my areas of weakness, and the goal isn't really to create production art, but to somehow articulate the idea of a particular 3d space in my head inside a tool. I've had fun doodling simple 1 and 2-point perspective spaces in my notebook, and I think once I've gotten to the stage of capturing that in blender it will be pretty neat.

viz

Still experimenting with visualization solutions. Yesterday I got a little C#/OpenGL program running, with enough functionality to get a sense for what it would take to implement a basic 3d visualizer. Today I got Unity set up on my linux machine. This was surprisingly easy--I just took the latest .deb file from the linux thread on the unity forums, let it install its large number of dependencies, and then there was unity. Pretty neat. Unity certainly deserves serious consideration. It has downsides, but it's the devil I know. And it runs in linux after all :-)

viz

[viz][5hrs] I went from a hacky DLL-path finding solution to a rather nice one. My visualizer dependencies are nicely contained in an sdk directory, and my buildshell python script sets up all the necessary environment variables (LD_LIBRARY_PATH, MONO_PATH). I experimented with OpenGL.Net bindings, but there's not a lot of information on setting them up on linux, and it definitely seems like I'm missing a few pieces (create the OpenGL context? set .config files so the dll can actually find the SOs?). So...back to openTK for now.

viz, dll hell

[moss][7hrs] Turned my attention fully to prototyping the visualizer today. After much internal debate, I decided the first-pass visualizer will be a managed process that implements its own custom renderer via managed bindings to the OpenGL API. The goal of this is to get a 3D scene driven by a simple iteration of the visualizer protocol up and running, and to give me an opportunity to dip my toes into graphics programming.

The final form of the visualizer is still very much TBD--certainly it's the area I have the least technical background in, and I'm feeling my way as I go. After much DLL-hell, I've reached "spinning cube demo program", with SFML and OpenTK as the dependencies.

unittest + visualizer planning

[moss][4hrs] Not much accomplished today. Finished hooking up all existing unittests and began planning for visualizer.

unittest

[moss][7hrs] Got unittest running in new build shell, and scanning most of the interesting methods in mosscore. Whenever I actually implement unit tests, it never fails to shock me how many problems they find. In fact, it looks like there's a problem with polymorphic serialization, which I know was working at one point. I will sort that out tomorrow. Then maybe it will be time to start thinking about the visualizer!