02 Nov 2016
Today after several years I finally feel comfortable with the look and feel of my blog :)
http://buff.ly/2fcPdAf
31 Oct 2016
Unity Prototype
Unity Prototype
31 Oct 2016 - Tags: prototype, unity
30 Oct 2016
Driving in Washington can be so pretty :)
29 Oct 2016
This is probably the best portable system I have ever tried. Lit screen, clam shell, large rechargeable battery. It also fits in any pocket.
29 Oct 2016
I am not very happy with the quality of the camera in my Pixel C :/
PRGE 2016
28 Oct 2016 - Tags: expo, gaming, portlan, retro
Another great Portland Retro Gaming Expo :)
Dev Blog 161011
11 Oct 2016 - Tags: battlevr, prototype, vr
I have not written an update for a few weeks but several bugs have been fixed and progress remains steady. I algo got to take this game to the VR Meetup in Seattle and it was a great time. The overall feedback was that people were excited to see a multiplayer game. But still the graphics and UI were very unimpressive.
I remain focused on fixing remaining bugs and adding the needed assets to present this as a valid prototype game.
Dev Blog 160918
18 Sep 2016 - Tags: battlevr, programming, vr
This iteration has been a bit slow because I had to do some refactoring and fix some fallout from enabling LOD Groups. After doing that I proceeded to change all assets in Unity from binaries to yaml files, which will make it much easier when merging changes.
Since I am in Alpha-1 stage I am espending more time thinking about the actual gameplay and how the UI should look. Now that Github also added the Projects tab, I have been creating card and linking issues in the board.
Changes
Project improvements
The big change here was changing from binary asset files to yaml ones. This change involved a nasty rebase between some changes had across multiple machines and as a result I had to link some assets. The other big change was that I added the UnitySampleUI package to the repo. This is big not because there were big changes but rather becuase initially I was not going to include packages into the repo. At the end, this Package is free and availabel for devs to use it so I guess there is no damage in including it. Eventually when I start working on final assets it will be removed anyways.
Improving look and feel
Now that I am going to be showing the game to people I thought it was time to start working on polishing some edges. I have been going over the issues I have and cleaning some low hanging fruit, things like moving UI around and adding particle effects. This changes do not require lots of code changes but give the game a much better look.
Next Items
I will be demoing the game to people during the Seattle VR meetup on Thursday 22nd, so for that I want to clean up some issues, mostly the damn crash the only happens when leaving a game in VR.
Other change I would like to look into as well is the hability to make builds via the command line. I want to have a command to make builds for the platform I want. This would speed up my development so I will not have to be changing build platform by using the UI.
Dev Blog 160913
13 Sep 2016 - Tags: battlevr, meetup, prototype, vr
I finally got to show the prototype I have for BattleVR in this video as well as a Reddit thread. The reaction was overall positive with some discussion, which is always good. What I am showing is the milestone that I call Prototype 3. The idea with prototype 1-3 was for me to get familiar with Unity and to code the basic systems that would power the game. Basically a POC with most of the core components of the game.
Now that the code and the word is out, my plan is to do weekly iterations along side with a blog post. I have also update the Roadmap and the Milestones page. Now the project is moving into Alpha-1 stage.
Changes
Added Support for LOD - e9c75d9f397bb5c42ec6bad7f874fc07ed7632ad
This is the first change after moving into Alpha-1. It involves replacing the main meshes(player ships, capital ships, space station) with LOD(Level of Detail) Groups. This are basically an abstraction that allows me to provide different meshes of different complexity based on the distance of the camera. I added support for LOD groups in the PlayerPrefab and the respective AssetManager methods. Also some enviromental objects are using LOD Groups like Capital Ships and the SpaceStation in the middle of Level1.
That all for last week. Thanks for reading.