We have entered the final week. No more major changes are being added by the team to minimize risk. Everyone is focusing on polish and bug fixes, myself included.
To start off the week, I found a multitude of tracks for the team to pick from to replace our current game music. Our placeholder music has been replaced with something more official and rights free. Should we choose to do so in the future we can compose our own score, but this music will keep us from running into any legal trouble.
I made a few more fixes related to the marker system. The text on the markers is finally working, however a new bug has popped up related to the shader. It is incompatible with the text and only renders the text as a black box. Currently I have not been able to pinpoint a fix so the text is currently disabled. If a fix can be found before the final pitch then it shall be applied, but only if it does not break anything further.
I also worked on a quality of life change of being able to delete specific markers using the marker menu. I almost had a solution within the current system, but it would not find the markers it was supposed to. However, it is applicable under a new, marker specific system that can be done should our game go forward. The backend work required means this needs to be put on hold for now to minimize the risk at this point in development.
Should anything new pop up that is game breaking I shall work toward fixing it in these last few days, but for now all looks well from my end and I can lend more assistance to my team in their endeavors should they require it.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Week 9: End in Sight
The game is starting to wrap up in preparation for our final pitch in a few weeks. We have brought together all our necessary features and the bugs are being squashed.
One particularly stubborn bug on my end, lighting showing up on the map, has finally been fixed. Last week I got a shader to remove the lighting, but it distorted the colors of various props. Nothing seemed to work. Fixing the colors caused the lighting to return while removing the lighting would just re-break the colors. At one point I had even removed some colors and rendered them as just white with a black outline. My final solution ended up being a simple one, instead of trying to keep the map's normal colors I applied a color filter to the whole thing. I gave it a sepia tone to look more like an old, faded paper map. The color issues were masked and the lighting was completely removed.
I also fixed another bugs related to entering buildings, where the mask applied to the player camera also applied to the map. My last change directly to the map was adding and removing specific structures from the map. This is to give the player something to find and keep track of with their markers.
Onto the markers themselves, I have completed their final iteration for the time being. I would have liked to do more, but fixing the maps bugs was more important since the markers at least worked as intended, they just lacked extra functionality. Some of my original goals are in place, but the rest has been put on hold. If was are chosen to continue development after our final pitch, I will give the markers the full functionality they deserve.
One particularly stubborn bug on my end, lighting showing up on the map, has finally been fixed. Last week I got a shader to remove the lighting, but it distorted the colors of various props. Nothing seemed to work. Fixing the colors caused the lighting to return while removing the lighting would just re-break the colors. At one point I had even removed some colors and rendered them as just white with a black outline. My final solution ended up being a simple one, instead of trying to keep the map's normal colors I applied a color filter to the whole thing. I gave it a sepia tone to look more like an old, faded paper map. The color issues were masked and the lighting was completely removed.
I also fixed another bugs related to entering buildings, where the mask applied to the player camera also applied to the map. My last change directly to the map was adding and removing specific structures from the map. This is to give the player something to find and keep track of with their markers.
Onto the markers themselves, I have completed their final iteration for the time being. I would have liked to do more, but fixing the maps bugs was more important since the markers at least worked as intended, they just lacked extra functionality. Some of my original goals are in place, but the rest has been put on hold. If was are chosen to continue development after our final pitch, I will give the markers the full functionality they deserve.
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Week 8: Unity Documentation Woes
This week, I was pretty much going in blind for all my tasks. Having done very little with Unity's UI, I needed to learn a lot from scratch. What I couldn't have predicted is how little Unity 5 seems to have out there. I've spent up to an hour just to find the replacement for a method found in every Unity answer and tutorial. Others are so vague it takes incredibly specific searches to finally find that single answer that actually explains what is happening. Unity 5 seems to have shaken up more than I expected, and I lost a decent amount of time to searching in circles.
The marker system is finally resembling what I envisioned it as. Markers are limited on the map. They are given a unique color to be easily differentiated on the map. They still require names and I'm considering a warning popup to let the player know a marker is going to be removed when they hit the cap. Choosing which marker to remove would be the ideal situation, but this simpler system works for now.
Lighting bug is still a problem, though now for different reasons. I was able to get replacement shaders working, but all the ones I have tried so far distort the colors of the objects that are visible on the map. I've tried a few different edits to fix the colors but they make no difference, so I'm probably missing something in relation to how these shaders are working. As soon as I figure out the color issue I will probably use it to apply a "map" look. Just having them working as mostly intended is a great start though, and it can be easily tinkered with going forward.
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