I like to move it move it!
Today I had a lot of distractions preventing me from being as productive as I would like but nonetheless I did at least get through the player movement and start the very beginning of the enemy AI. Above you can see the player movement in action. Overall it was a fairly straight forward process. Since I had spend some time in my 2D project on my own learning animation I was very comfortable with the Challenge of using the Animator and a Bool property to trigger the player movement on/off when it came up for the Stealth game.
I was also well prepared from my 2D experience of using the OnTriggerEnter Method to trigger code, in this case a camera change when the player walks through certain areas that had a collider along the ground. See the below pic for a visual representation in green of the 6 colliders associated with the 6 different camera angles that the player would trigger each time the player would cross into a new camera zone.
Overall nothing in this section was overly complicated and I did learn a new function called transform.LookAt(target) that we included on a script attached to the Main camera that caused the main camera to always rotate and face the player(target) while he is moving. It was a simple command but wow so cool to see it in action.
I also learned about using the Navigation function in the Unity editor to bake a Floor collider that will lock and restrict the players movement to the designated arena, ie can’t walk through walls or objects and keeps him on the floor. I also played around in the settings here and increased the radius of the agents/my player object so his arms and body don’t clip the display cases as he was walking around. Very cool….love the Navigation feature.
Afterwards I realized I was having some issue with my lighting. For some reason Unity was spitting out an error regarding some of my Lighting files being missing so I had to re-generate all my lighting info. This took a while each time I generated the lighting. I changed my setting to Auto-Generate and also progressive mapping using the GPU. I had to do it several times before it stuck, I don’t know why but I guess my files got corrupted. Seems to be okay now.
Only a few days left to the program but I am confident that I will at least finish the Stealth game as I am about 60% done already. Unfortunately I started the program much later than most people and will not have a chance to work on a project through the program since it will likely end this week but I will continue my learning at the same pace regardless and eventually connect with some like-minded team members so we can work together to produce something cool like the Nova Team did! So far I have worked solo, but I do feel after a couple more weeks that I will be knowledgeable enough that I could start working and collaborating with others and be an asset to the team towards creating a unique project together. I looking forward to learning the intricacies of working on a programming project in a team environment. One thing that really stood out from watching our Nova Team’s presentation about their project was how important good planning and great communication was on a team project. I look forward to the challenge when it comes! :-)