Unity Virtual Project: Progress 1

November 21, 2018

I had some trouble getting started on a concept for my Unity project, what I did is I went back to my project IRIS which is my game project I started in late August after attempting several other objects. I found just spending an hour in it let me readjust to Unity's editor. I spent time cleaning up code but more importantly it let me test things like serialized fields and using standard classes as well I learned a bit about graphics and custom editor scripts and to be more specific I learned about how much I wasn't ready to take on that level of coding. The feature I tried cleaning up was an upgrade system where I can simply build a object that modifies the player and by adding that game object to a reference it applies that ability to that player such as boots that can add in air movement and double jumping, I also had to adjust my movement code that would linearly control velocity for one that uses the physics and acceleration as that would be more open to further upgrading down the line.

After getting readjusted I decided that it would be a good idea to start building things that are simple but unique to experience such as water and buoyancy, right now that exists as a static cube with a trigger collider that applies upward force on any object that enters it's trigger. It is possible to make buoyancy based on density but Unity's transform only measures size from the base model, I havent been able to find any documentation that can give me the volume of a mesh for the calculations.

The next component I want to work on comes from my game project IRIS where I wanted to develop a character that's a conglomerate of consciousnesses as a networked organism, this would be easy narratively but my stretch goal is to have a form of city sim for the player to explore and this networked organism could move and shift through the city's system growing and changing behaviour (like I said, it's a stretch goal). I thought this project would be a good opportunity to prototype that concept. My language midterm was able to collect and network words based on how the user responds, with Unity I can take advantage of it's GameObject system and skip a lot of the week of work I did just getting Processing to produce and display multiple instances of Objects. Right now Im working for a gameObject call BioMass to search for node by shooting out rayCasts or sphereCasts in random directions like a snake tongue waving back and forth looking for Resource Node Gameobjects and adding a duplicate of itself to it's direction. I hope to later develop this in ways such as passing information through the connected parts or developing new types of Biomass objects based on growing conditions. I have a few ideas of how to do this but what I really want to see if there's any viable self learning programming for Unity that's comprehensive enough for someone at my skill to make use of.

Here's a screenshot of the first test, everything crashed so Im not doing that again. It's ironic that in my first attempt it duplicated so fast Unity bottlenecked, hope I dont destroy humanity or anything.