Virtual Camera Man!

Today was fun. I tackled the Beginning Cutscene for the Stealth Game. Above is a small excerpt of the 65 second clip that involved 14 different virtual camera angles with all the shots needing to be coordinated with the audio track. It took time and patience but the end result was well worth it. I really enjoy using Virtual Machine, its not without its faults like when the Audio goes out unexpectedly but aside from the small irritations its a very powerful tool in Unity that can create WOW scenes in any game.

I thought I would actually get to Player Movement today but I ended up spending a lot of time playing around with the different scenes and trying different takes and then trying to perfect each shot. I spent 6 hours on about 65 seconds of footage…lol! Alas the joys of being a game developer. I tend to get obsessive over the small details. Several times I would call my wife over to look at a scene then make a change and show her and she would laugh at me and say she couldn’t even tell what I changed. The little barely perceivable imperfections drive me nuts so I do what I have to make sure it looks the way the director notes call the scene and If I can I try to add my own spin on the shots.

After I was done with the Cutscene I did try to commit my change to the Unity Collaboration Services but it bugged out. I couldn’t understand what the issue was but after checking the boards, apparently it’s a known issue this month and I decided to scrap trying to use it and instead send my project to GitHub.

I have used GitBash/GitHub for version control on my Space Shooter without any issues and it was simple enough. I heard stories from team members having a lot of issues but I was lucky I guess….until now… I thought the Git Gods had spared me the pain but I guess I fell out of their good graces because tonight I had couple of roadblocks. At first I got an error that the file paths where too long, then after figuring out a way to force GIT to accept my longer file paths, I got the dreaded Large File error that prevents you from using files over 100mb. I downloaded LFS and was about to start that ritual for the first time but then it dawned on me that I didn’t even need that file, it was an Asset from the Learning section. So instead, I went on GitHub and added the path to that folder in the Gitignore file and voila problem solved.

I still have a lot to learn with Git. While it seemed easy to me at first, I realized today, there was a lot more to it, and a couple times I made a bit of a mess of my REPO. The lesson here is that its simple while everything is working but you better GIT GOOD to prepare yourself when things do go wrong so you know how to fix the situations rather than making it worse.

Mahalo!