Day 30
By: Michal Rooney
Tags: Unity, Game Design, Completion, Problem Solving, Gamedevhq

Day 30

I had some really bad technical difficulties come to a head. The problem is I need to replace some equipment and it’s just not readily available at the moment. Fortunately replacements are on the way but they’ll probably get here about the day after I end with this program for the time being. The group meeting was particularly great. It was on animation and things you can do with various things we weren’t being introduced to do with Unity. It wasn’t anything I didn’t know Unity can do but it was nice to figure out how it would it be done in that format. I’m familiar with animating in Maya for example and it’s amazingly similar but where to find all the things it’s kind of a little bit new to me so it was useful in that sense. it is kind of nice that they built most of the simpler and of that into Unity itself so you don’t have to have another software installed should you not. Kind of a stroke of luck because I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be using things with a student license on projects like this so that’s great. I am certain that I can use the student license to complete these projects as I’m not making any money with them but if I was ever to use the assets and anyway that did I would have to redo them after upgrading and that’s just a bit of a headache. Unity rather generously just doesn’t care unless I’m making a hundred thousand a year through publishing on their platform. So I’m certain that I considered a student even if I’m working for the initial part of it and that’s good to not have to delineate about. It means I can pick up what I’m working on and take it straight to an actual studio and get to work. UDK has a similar policy but Unity is slightly better for the beginner Dev. UDK just wants 5% of your profits on commercial releases. Sounds fair but it’s nicer to not have to calculate that when you’re starting out on the small scale and probably not trying to look into exactly what’s taxable or not. You only have to bother when your studio makes it with the grossing under hundred-thousand-dollar category.

In any case I have been implementing the new futures I am almost done with that and that’s great because that means that I would be at the finish line for the game. Problem is I still do have some bugs from wayback that I have not really been able to fix and I can’t really get help on. they have shown me the way that it’s supposed to work and my code matches that but something I’ve done is different and I’m not aware of what it is. Oh well at least it’s not my skills as a developer it’s probably my skills and understanding exactly where I need to check something in Unity. When I build something new attends to work so I don’t think I’ll be encountering this at all projects I just seem to have done something that I don’t understand how to track down. I’m not sure that the person I’m asking is really that familiar with the editor side of it as opposed to the code code. Oh well. So the two options are to rebuild my entire project, over the one day that I have to do it or redo the coating structure so that it will work even if it’s not what they intended. I’ve looked up different coding structures that can work and they do I realize that I shouldn’t have to be looking up those and implementing them as well but you know if they’re not going to help me fix the bugs, and I can’t determine what I need to do to fix them I suppose using something different is fine. I just like to know so that I can understand how to not put anything like this into a project in the future, but on the other side have the equation I am learning a lot more code structures so if I ever run into something where it’s just not going to work and I have a deadline I can use a different way. It’s not a bad approach programming because there’s usually quite a few roads that lead to Rome.

Eventually I’m going to figure out how to use the ones that they told me to but you know I have to learn some other ones to get there I’m deciding to stop feeling personally to blame for it. My emotions aren’t the point here so much as I create some code that works, it’s the project and move on to something else I can learn a lot more efficiently from been trying to fix a problem that is probably a lot more difficult than I really should be taking on before completing enough projects to understand what’s happening. so yes I’m putting the code to do certain things on completely different objects. However, that works well if I try to put them where I know that I’m supposed to be for this project that just crashes and breaks. I rebuilt it about four times now and that’s why I’m not so happy about the rebuild everything option even if I did have the time for it I’m starting to think that I’m going to just keep rebuilding the same error unless I know the purpose behind what I’m doing or not doing the way Unity is expecting. So I just can’t attach things to my player but I can certainly have them activate when things happen to my player. My player will not be the one communicating that this is happened necessarily, because that is where the scripts seem to hang.

I rebuilt it simply multiple times and I know it works under other circumstances so I know there is something very wrong here. Instead of keeping that in my game I’m just replacing it with a different system. I’m switching agency role to the observer, so while the player might say something to another script under normal circumstances, I have shifted that burden to the observers so that so that now when things happen to the player they know this and react appropriately. It means coding for every other thing that’s going to have to notice that about the player but in this case that wasn’t an undoable task and at least I’ve learned how to do that in case I would need you for some reason, player was not active in scene. Should the player be deactivated for campaign reasons or I need to bring in some other players this would be what I would do for that. While there’s wasn’t really necessary, it still means that I can complete the game and hopefully one day I will know the explanation for why these scripts are losing track of the code flow. At least the one pointer I have noted from going to talks to me is that it shouldn’t be this difficult so I shouldn’t be trying to solve this problem; rebuilding it is designed to go back to a time when I didn’t have to deal with the issue, so if I decide to use completely different code there’s really not much of a difference there except that I have to learn completely different code.

At least that’s something we’re I can make / feel I’m making some kind of progress.