The 2.5 hours sessions are not as useful as i would have imagined, it's difficult to fit 2.5 hour block in my normal day, however i did try and fit as close to those boundaries as possible. The work produced during the sessions is of a higher quality/efficiency than the attempted 4 hour sessions but the effort of trying to block out the time from my day is quite substantial.
As i hinted this morning I'm going to try my regular method of ad-hoc work sessions at some point this week but I'm keeping with the same session tomorrow as it's a weekday and i would like to see if there is any difference.
Work wise today has been great, as i said i got the map system rolling and finally some screenshots. Working on the camera controls has been less fun...Maths is hard; it never fails to surprise me how little math's i know.
Simple arithmetic used in array's lists and counters, i use all the time, however quaternions and 3d maths aren't areas i usually tackle. That being said it hasn't been too bad and I've learnt a few tricks in the unity framework that helped things along.
The way unity scripting works is a bit strange, mostly because there are multiple different ways to accomplish the same thing and they are usually wildly different in their implementation.
I've moved as much of my code as possible into a separate .net dll project, this is a personal preference that I've always used when dealing with unity projects. It allows/forces me to work on the library in a completely editor agnostic environment. That is not to say that the library is standalone as i use quite a few classes from the unityengine.dll it just means i can separate all of my logic from the rendering/modeling side of things.
The other major reason for this is the lack of JIT debugging for visual studio from unity, I create the library in separate project and then have a small console application(or nunit test library) so i can run through the code and benefit from the debugging features of visual studio. There are a few areas where this does not work, for example the instantiation of unity prefabs, but i find it works much better for me if i reduce the amount of testing i need to do in the unity editor.
Still coding strong and probably will be for the next few hours so i should have some more screenies tomorrow.
Have been working hard today, perhaps some time for some portal 2.
Oh yeah portal 2 is awesome.
Screenshot:
Not much going on here just a simple rendering of a map, however there is quite a lot going on in the background.
I created a map system that uses TilePacks to populate map files that are written in xml.
When a map is loaded it is provided with a corresponding TilePack the map file is traversed and each tile has a corresponding TileName attribute.
When a tile is loaded the TileName attribute is matched to the corresponding tile from the pack and cloned, positioned and rendered accordingly.
This will allow me to adjust swap out TilePacks without having to rewrite maps and also quickly write and adjust maps without having to code.
The dimensions of each map are calculated from the amount of tiles in the map file, so i can have maps that are not perfectly square.
As always comments and suggestion are welcome.
And yeah, Portal 2 is awsome