I’ve decided in the end to optimise the level geometry. There’s a fair bit of scope for removing polys there. I went through the Build Your Own folder, and managed to remove about 10% of the total polys in the folder (including the models that were as optimal as can be), but theres 2 problems with that.

1. The level geometry wasn’t made by just sticking a few of these prefabs together.

2. I didn’t take mapping into account, so probably screwed a lot of it up.

I’ve also been looking into the assignment more. I think my original idea was too ambitous. Too much hardcore scripting to do in not very much time when I have only a basic knowledge of how Unity operates scriptwise.

So, instead I’m gonna look at the graphical side. Namely, improving and extending the current level.

After instantiating a GUIStyle, the background image is then assigned to it, and the whole thing is assigned to a label (covering the whole window) as the last parameter.

GUILabel(Rect(x, y, width, height), label, style)

GUIButton is the same but without the style at the end. GUIButtons are also called as the arguament in an IF statement, with the bit inside the curly brackets being the action to take when the buttons pressed.

Started on the GUI part of the tutorial today. The first section was relatively easy (the actual overlay in the game showing health and fuel collected. The second part, however, is horrible! It’s about making the start menu, and contains a lot of code thats only half explained. I basically ended up getting scared and leaving early! I’ll likely have another stab at it later in the week.

In other news though, I’ve been thinking about my assignment recently, and came up with a cool idea. My dad’s bought a new computer, and it has Vista Ultimate on it (though he’s getting the free upgrade to Win7 once Dell get their ass in gear), and it has a downloadable game called Tinker on it. Basically, you’re this little robot who has to solve these puzzles to get to a teleporter in a set number of moves.

It’s a fun game, with a relatively simple mechanic.

Added the fallout death and respawn points this week. I got quite confused in the respawn points when it came to setting the initial respawn point, but got it in the end. It was just a case of adding the first respawn point (Respawn1) to the initial respawn value of all 3 respawn points.

Supposedly, we’re supposed to have worked out what we want to do with out assignment to extend the game by now, but since I’ve barely scratched the surface with Unity, I’m gonna wait a bit before thinking about it.

Flew through the scripting tutorial for this week. I’ve used javascript before, so it was only the Unity specific stuff I actually needed.

Got to the end of adding the blob shadow thing.  Layers are pretty cool. I’ve never really used them in other things I’ve done (with the exception of my occasional, and brief, jaunts into the world of Photoshop), but I am certainly coming more around to liking them.

Still not got anything logbook-worthy to add though.

So, Unity. My only real experience with other game authoring tools like this are the Hammer editor for VALVe’s Source games and what I assume is a modified version of the Radiant editor used for CoD4. Both of those use brushes to create the geometry, which is ultimately what put me off both of them. However, Unity’s apparent native use of the FBX format means I can use Max!

I like the drag-and-drop aspect and the ability to show public variables inside a script within Unity’s GUI. That should certainly help in more complex projects. Oh, and the ability to edit things in real-time while playing is pretty awesome too! The interface seems pretty good.

Got as far as the camera and character controller in the tutorial. So frog-man is gliding along nicely.

To be clear from the get-go, I don’t like logbooks. I find them mostly pointless and time-consuming. They go against the way I think and work. Frankly, I’m starting to get annoyed with how insistant Anglia are with forcing them upon us. I can understand why students should be encouraged to keep one (I’m sure many people do find them useful), but having them as part of assessments, and counting for quite a sizable portion of the final mark, seems wrong to me.