After IGF submission, all the engineer had a like a two week long rest which we can use it to catch up our assignment in Engineering Class.
Then I starting to do the level design of our game. I had made like ten levels on paper and had made a three of them in illustrator. I build one in the unity. The first time to use Chris's level creator to build a level is not so easy. But If you went though once and know the process, it will so much easier.And I think I am the only one who gives Zac a level per week as additional levels.
I also had some new idea about our game. Thanks for the disguising on JB's class. Now I and Zeph are working together to make a Anxiety level , in our level there will be no light, you will have a flash light with you but it has a battery life . You can not turn it on all the time.
I build a huge map for this level like below.
The Game Play is like this.
I will give a link of this version of game when we finish it in the future.
I get new task which made me struggling all these days. I need to made a effect for our drones, each of them will have a scanner light in front of game.
This scanner light plane need to block by walls, player, other guard during the game playing. At first I was trying to do this by creating a new type of light in unity. I learned about the light cookies and try to use to two light to fake this effect, but then I find out it is impossible to do it in unity. I can not change the light cookies into a shape of scanner plane. Then I had thought about raycasting. but it needs to check a lot of points for the plane
Then I try to make a volume light in unity which I think will be the best way to do it.
This is a fake volume light in unity which looks like what I need but it still go through the player which can not work for us.
Another link is the Unity3D Extension: Volumetric Light Beam Kit I followed the way they do it and found out this one looks so good like below, but it will still go through body.
Then I realize I need to change the way to do. I did some researching on the internet and found this. Depth Mask Unity
In this example the boat shows perfect, although the water part is higher than the boat like the picture below, but because of the new rendering shader which is called Depth Mask.
So I starting to do the same way and wrote my own shader but I only get the thing like this.
It shows good but I can not find a way to calculate the length of invisible cube, to stop the light plane to show after go though the invisible cube.
I had to say at this point. I was so frustrating about it. I worked for nearly two weeks and it turn to nothing.
OH MY GOD!!!!!
I went to Jack to talk about the this and Max also come to me to try to help me out. But we still can not find out a way to do it.Then I got some intelligence from our programming class from Shane. We talked about this problem on Class and decide to fake it, to separate the scanner plane to six pieces and do the ray casting on each piece. We know this is not perfect, but it will work. Sometime you really need to be cowboy programmer.
So I just did as we discuss on the class and it only took me like 3 or 4 days to finish it
During these days we had a huge progress on our game. A lot of new models, UI designs, textures had been added in our game.
At first I finished a very easy task "the cancel Button" on the hacker's side. Although after the important play testing we decided to change the way in hacker's play, we don't need the cancel button anymore , haha.
But I am very happy about the changing in hacker's playing. Sometimes even myself will get confused in the input of hacker's.
After that, we start to fixing the bugs in the game. I am glad that we have hansoft with us it is so helpful for debugging. I think I had fixed like six bugs.
We also took a lot of time to do play testing with each other in the team.
And I need to mention the play testing again. We set it up on Wednesday afternoon, I also invited my friend coming to our lab to play our game. After Wednesday we felt like there comes a bomb. It was very hard for
people on the hacker'side to play. And we had a meeting on the Thursday morning, I and several members suggest changing the way of control in hacker's play. And It looks like this right now.
Hey, I am going to update my blog today. It seems two weeks have past since the last update.
As I mentioned last time , I am building the Debugging mode to makes our game easier for producers to test and also made some helpful function for other programmer to use.
This task is not easy to finish, I need to like go through every part of the coding and know the structure of the whole game. It takes me a lot of time to talk with almost all the engineers on the team to let them help me to understand each part of the game. And then it seems to get easier to do debugging mode. It is interesting find out how it works in network between the hacker and thief. I had learned a lot by going through other guys code.
Anyway I got these thing worked, Although producers don't check it yet, but I think it will be fun.
I got a big task during this week, and I am really very busy on all of these tasks.
I starting building some new UI things to let players restart game when you fail in the game like getting caught by enemies and also the ending screen when you go though the level. I made some art by myself and it looks awful right now but it shows it is functional.
And then I got the big task to build the debugging mode to make our game is easy to test.
I have got a task list like this. I got like two weeks to finish this.
Time to go back to work. Wish I can finish those on time.
First sprint finished, it seems a lot of work need to be done before IGF, and we don't have so much time to do it. It will be a tough semester, ha ha. We got a new way to arrange the task which seems much better than last semester. We starting using hansoft again. I mean we had used this software last semester, but it seems that it is not so helpful. But right now is different. Here is the new way we are using it right now. Oh,the workflow which our producers call it. So there will be a engineer leader in the team who will basically separate the tasks to other engineers. All the engineers will start working at this moment, when they finish they need to turn the status of task to Producer Review and then produces will take the task and play the game to test if the task is done and functional. If not it will be sent back to engineers. If it is OK to go, it will send to engineer leader to check the detail code to see if it is good enough for future working. So it gives the QA-test work to producers and we don't need to wait until next week to fix the problem and this also can push us to work harder. Because the tasks are sending from engineer leader who knows better about the tasks and our abilities than the producers, the tasks will be done more efficiently
Here is a picture of the workflow
This sprint I am working on the part to find the way to stop our camera go though the wall and it seems done by this time
This cause because of the near clipping plane is two close to the wall in our game playing. So I first change the near clipping plane of our FPS camera to 0.01 which is the minimum value in unity. It looks very thing is good right now. But this is not the source of the problem.
So I am trying to fix this by changing the pivot center of the FPS controller of unity. Right now the camera and the pivot center of the controller are not at the same point which cause this happen. Wish I am good luck.
I didn't update my blog for a while, I usually don't like to update it. It looks like you are writing a dairy on the internet and share with others which is kind of wired to me. Anyway I need to write this down at the end of summer.
It is a wonderful summer for me. Not only the travels but also I did on our game. I was asking to writing a message system which will handle all the message in and out in our game. I called this "messagebox". It has twenty types of message styles to give other programmer to use it.
I learned a lot of GUI stuff in Unity. I also wrote a message manage file which controls the message box running. If I don't do this part, the message box will still work, but I just want our structure ill be better for the future work. I decide doing this because during the time I do the assignment of our engineering 2 class,if have this kind of file or type manager will be very helpful. Sometimes you spend some time on building the foundation is not a bad thing.
