If you are as in to RPG's as I am then the inventory is a big deal to you!  There's a lot of really cool stuff that plays in to a Role Playing Game when it comes to your character's development as it ties in to the equipment in your inventory and I really dig working on this part of the game.

One of the most difficult things to do while working on the inventory is to not go crazy implementing too many 'cool features' too early as that might cause me to have to refactor a lot of work if I decide to change things once the design starts gaining a bit of focus.



In the case of potions I added this week that concern actually came up several times in the code and once with the art as well!

I decided to have potions have two major qualities that help delineate what they are.

The first is what PotionType it is such as Health, Mana, Strength etc.

The second is the PotionStrength which is where I got in a little bit of trouble with over-doing things I think.  I decided it would be a good idea to essentially have an greater number of PotionStrengths than there are ItemQuality levels.

So basically if ItemQuality is broken in to  an enum like this:



   public enum ItemQuality
    {
        COMMON,
        RARE,
        SUPERIOR,
        ELITE
    }

And the PotionStrengths initially looked like this:

    public enum PotionStrengths
    {
        TINY,
        SMALL,
        MEDIUM,
 LARGE,
        HUGE,
 FULL 
    }

This became a problem in two areas.

The first is when I use the item inspector I color the title of the item according to its ItemQuality.

I should have stopped right there because 6 PotionStrengths is more than 4 ItemQuality levels; and that was going to make my code more complex, or I would have to ignore strength as a factor when it comes to evaluating a potions quality.

Of course though it makes all the sense in the world that a potion that is really small/weak is lower quality than a potion that is big or full ; so I should have put a bit more consideration in right then.



But no - I barreled on and didn't worry about the bit of code to print out the item title yet. I started working on the item icons next and it was going fairly well.

I have a quick screen here to show I kept the process pretty simple; I actually modeled this in Silo 2 and then used the "Subdivide" feature in the program to "smooth" it out and took a screenshot within the Silo 2 program!  I did not bother to do a 3d Render as that would have taken a lot more time for production and it looks good enough - especially as you see in the last shot I overlayed and applied a mild Photoshop effect (took literally 5 seconds) and it looks great!

So as I was iterating through the design's of all the potion bottles some things occurred to me when I got to the 4th bottle:

1) For every additional potion strength I do I have to come up with another at least mildly interesting potion bottle to visually display that this potion is different to the user (read I was raising my production time )

2) For each of those it will take up additional video memory that has to be stored

3) It was becoming clear just from the sheer number of bottles I was modelling that this was just too much variety; it was going to become inventory clutter rather than useful.

So I took a step back and decided to keep it down to 4 PotionStrengths after all going with

    public enum PotionStrengths
    {
        TINY,
        SMALL,
        MEDIUM,
        BIG   
    }

Which ends up being convenient in several ways and implements something I like in theory which is each one of those can represent a potion that increments its strength by 25% so you have potions that can "heal" or "restore mana" of  25%, 50%, 75% and 100% making their perceived usefulness and quality match the ItemQuality levels perfectly!

As well thiss makes it more convenient when you are in a difficult fight to make a decision to use a 25% or 50% potion rather than a 100% every time because that's all you have available.  If all you had was a 100% potion you might save it until your health is extremely low because you want to get full use out of it.

Also this lets me give out healing and mana potions more frequently as the stronger ones will be rarer and therefore perceived as more rewarding (and hopefully exciting!) finds for the player.

Also .. if you hadn't figured it out yet.. if I stick to this strict scaling of 25% - 100% values .. the potion retains its usefulness no matter what level you are!

When I had 6 PotionStrength levels I was thinking to scale the potions for hard coded values like 10 health, 25 health, 50 health and so on.  In a percentage paradigm the potion will retain an equally relative value to your level through out the game!

And when i realized that I knew I had the right answer and fixed the code to match the 4 level quality and kept myself from modelling further bottles and taking up more video memory!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

The Rise of Dagon had a really nice start in 2014, but I am going to skip a January based 'year' recap because it was not started in January.

Also I am going to skip a studio style yearly recap at this point because my indie journey also did not start in January.

So for today I simply bring you the latest and greatest Rise of Dagon update!

Firstly I have continued with working on the inventory system that I talked about last week. Given that I decided to work on the 'item inspector' elements and begin to implement some of the procedural loot system so that it could be displayed in the inspector.

So as you see in the first image (top of post) that we have an item being highlighted by a yellow mouse over highlight, and when the cursor is over it we now have a 'inspector' panel informing you what the statistics of that particular item is. In the screenshot I have generated a random 'common' quality longsword. 

In the next screenshot I have an image that shows off 4 different random items of differing quality. 

As you see for each item as it gets better quality information changes as well as the stats of the item are better.





This was done using the  IPointerEnterHandler, IPointerExitHandler interfaces in the new Unity 4.6 UI system.  I learned about them by downloading the 4.6 example project.  I do not recall seeing these interfaces listed in the documentation for 4.6 -- so I would definitely recommend digging around in those sample projects if you have not already there are some hidden gems in there!

So I implemented the two relevant methods as seen here and simple set my highlight color, as well as call a method on the player inventory to set the inspector properties of the item that was clicked on in the slotnumber:

 public void OnPointerEnter(PointerEventData data)
 {
  if (containerImage == null)
   return;
        containerImage.color = highlightColor;
        playerInventory.SetInventoryInspector(slotnum);
 }

Then when done we set it back to the original color and disable the inspector until next time we need it:

 public void OnPointerExit(PointerEventData data)
 {
  if (containerImage == null)
   return;
 
  containerImage.color = normalColor;
        playerInventory.DisableInSpector();
 }

Finally I wanted to show off a little animated gif I made of a leather helmet that I decided to sculpt in to looking like a Raven molded in to the leather.  I ended up taking a screenshot ( as described last week) from a particular angle to use this as an actual icon for an armor set  - but it just looks cool all the way around so I wanted to share that on my dev log today.




Thanks for reading, see you next week!

This week I mainly focused on a process to create inventory armor icons for the players. I was able to previously purchase some weapon icons but I have as of yet not been able to get a good resource for the armor sets.

So I was able to work out a process that got a little faster as I went along which is really important if I'm going to create a bunch of icons by myself it can't take a really long time or the game will take too long!

So the chest armor took the longest being about two evenings to get it where I liked it.  The pants took a day. And then I was able to get the boots and gloves done in one day.

What I hope to do now that I've been through those pieces is to use the low poly version to sculpt additional armor variants very quickly speeding up the process even further.

I realize these are not incredible sculpt's that would look great in Thief game or something but they come out as armor icons very nicely.

Otherwise as time permitted I focused on some troubleshooting I had been putting off.  Previously I had to manually hit a 'load level' button once the main scene loaded ; given some of the changes I made this week now the level initializes on its own when you either start a new game or hit continue.

- Got automatic level loading in; previously you had to click a 'load level' in to the game once the game started
- You can now swap between different character inventories without having to go out of the inventory and back in
- added GUI "X" icon to close out inventory
- added supporting code for X icon to close out inventory

I also made some improvements to the inventory code to support swapping in between characters.

This next week I will probably work further on some armor icons and inventory code.

Thanks for reading, hope you had a nice holiday and a happy new year!

This week I got to enjoy sculpting in Mudbox on my new system.  I definitely noticed the difference.  Things seemed smoother and I was able to work with much higher sub-divisions without having any kind of performance issue.

Skull VDM I made in Mudbox:



It was a little weird, previously I had to sub-divide until just before I noticed a performance problem and do my sculpting just below that level.

Now with my new system I just subdivide to the level needed for the model and everything is much smoother.

So firstly I made a skull on a plane and then used it to make a template to do further carving with called a VDM.

So the VDM once made properly can then be used as a brush to scuplt with so I made this pillar that might be used on a wall panel as part of a decoration for architecture to add atmosphere.

I was really pleased with both how much easier it was to do the carving and then the use of the VDM was smoother/easier too!


Pillar stamped with VDM skull


 I also did some further experimentation with a block and some painting in Mudbox to make this block of stone that has skull's embedded in it.



It looks pretty neat but practically speaking its not a prop I would be likely to be able to use in the game.


Finally I spent some time further on the inventory system.  Now if you click on any of the character portraits to launch the inventory it will open it for that specific character and in the upper left it will show the characters Name, Character class, character race, and character level. At the moment I haven't implemented leveling so everyone is set to level 0 in case you were wondering why it shows this guy as level 0.



On the right side I made the inventory icons a little smaller to fit more inventory in a smaller area and then I used a test bit of code to randomly insert up to 50 1h or 2h weapons in to the inventory - or occasionally it will leave a blank spot.

I currently don't have any armor icons so I'm definitely going to need to work on that soon!

So that's it for this week.  For next week its Christmas holiday weekend in the United States where I am at - so I will probably either skip the update or do a very small one.

Thanks for reading!

Wow what a week!

Firstly if you had not already seen I participated in Ludum Dare 31 last weekend. I did the 48 hour competition version which means I had to make a game from scratch in 48 hours all by  myself.

I was really pleased at the theme "the entire game on one screen" and I was able to quickly and efficiently utilize Unity 4.6 to make the game idea I had planned on.

I really didn't hit any roadblocks in the process and the 4.6 Unity GUI went a long way (in my opinion) towards making this a really smooth process. I have been using the 4.6 GUI since it came out in beta so I don't blame you if haven't gotten up to speed on it yet; but I think most developers will find it reasonably easy to work with and suitable for many purposes.

I think it still has room to grow - but as a 1.0 version of the new GUI I'm very happy!

In other new I also found out last Friday (the 6th) that I was not going to get the house I was trying to buy and the people who had been selling it had a lien against them so they could not legally sell it.

So I ended up doing some house hunting on Saturday and Monday this week; and found a house I liked.  Then I ended up spending the rest of Monday evening filling out paperwork to put in an offer on the house.

In addition to all that the new parts for my PC I ordered from Newegg (two weeks ago!!!!) finally came in and I spent Friday night and this morning (Saturday the 13th) putting it together.

Everything went smoothly but it was a complete new system build as I have an old PC from about 5 years ago it was time to do a complete refresh!

So effectively I had about three evenings to work on the game; in which I did get a few things done!

Firstly I have expanded the players UI.  Particularly I have blocked out the area on the page for the player to have their personal attributes displayed when you hit the "i" button to go along with the inventory, character stats and the 'paper doll' to equip your armor.

Right now it looks a little bit too 'techno' (see screenshot at top of post) but I am still working on getting the first pass done and working from a programming standpoint- I'll polish the UI later.  Polishing before functionality is complete is often wasted time I have learned from previous experience.  (Yes, yes, I still can't help myself sometimes but I pat myself on the back when I can behave- and I'm doing that now!).

I also spent some time with Unity's 4.6 demo UI project where they have implemented a Draggable and a Dropable style script.

I learned quite a bit by doing so ; but at the same time their implementation stops short of being fully a drag & drop system.

In fact you can only drag in one direction!  And once you drop it; you can't drag it out.

The I combined the scripts in a new way to make what I thought would be a drag & drop script for any inventory slot - and it doesn't work!

So I read their all the code they have; and it all makes sense to me. I read it again; and it still made sense.

I assume something is intercepting one of my calls that I'm not aware of or something; but in any case from a 3-day productivity standpoint that's about all I had time for!

So this week I am settling in to my new PC and reinstalling programs, but I was careful to get Unity 3D , Photoshop, Visual Studio 2013 community edition all up and running first so I should be on track for continued development of The Rise of Dagon

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

BONUS UPDATE:

Just a quick update mid-production-week I participated in the Ludum Dare 31 48 hour compo and created DEATH POLICE 3000

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-31/?action=preview&uid=31427

DEATH POLICE 3000 is a satire based on the current social issues in the USA ... shooting of unarmed civilians by our police force most frequently black males but also homeless and mentally ill men are targeted as well, and combined with the old movie Death Race 2000 where sport was made of killing people.





WARNING: Features blood, killing innocent people including cartoon violence.

Gameplay is very simple; attempt to underprivileged people while avoiding killing privileged people. As long as you don't kill too many privileged people you will probably win! (AKA satirically the game is somewhat rigged like in real life)

There is no way to die; just try to get the most kills you can in 30 seconds.

If I had more time and was able to work more in to the game I would attempt to make a better challenge for the player than just a timer, some threats to avoid; perhaps try to kill people while not being filmed or to try and break iphones and cameras to destroy evidence and such but those were things I did not have time to get in!



The satire comes in at the end depending on if you "win" or "lose" you get slightly different messaging about your actions.

Thanks for playing, I hope you enjoy and please vote and leave feedback!



NOTES/BUGS:
- Made with Unity ; requires a browser that can run Unity web plugin and permission to do so
- QUIT does nothing in web mode
- there is nothing stopping you from running out of bounds of the screen at this time

This past week I updated to the new Beta 16 of Unity 5 and have been also house hunting.. despite that I got a really nice amount of work on the players inventory system for the Rise of Dagon!



So things are looking really good at the moment but I need to put the code together on the back end for this to all be useable .

This week I focused on the layout and trying to get it to scale right at different resolutions.

I also watched a few tutorials which were generally decent but I noticed that people don't seem to know about the ability to add Layout components to your UI.

On the left portion where the 'paper doll' slots for inventory is I have manually positioned the inventory slots; but on the right hand side the grid of actual inventory slots is done with a Unity Grid Layout component.

This is super handy; you do not have to spend a lot of time messing around with making things line up in code.  You add the component and put in a few parameters .. and bam! You have a working grid layout.

There is also a nice horizontal and vertical layout components; the menu bar at the bottom in the shown screenshot uses the horizontal layout!

Definitely check those out if you are using the new 4.6 unity GUI.

Other than that I will continue working on the inventory this week hopefully with the ability to drag & drop icons between slots this next week. I have never done that before so it may take a little work. .Its also not something in the new UI so I'll have to probably make my own IDragable interface or something to that effect.

As a side note I am at least tentatively going to do Ludum Dare 31

I should probably post a series of posts on my blog here and posts on the wordpress blog there as well as I go along.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Where does Dagon come into this? It doesn't look fishy/watery at all.

Or is it a different Dagon?

Hey surt,

Thanks for asking.

So there's what I think is the original Dagon from east semetic Mesopotamia as detailed here on wikipedia.

Then there's the Dagon of H.P. Lovecraft again wikipedia info here

Mine is neither, but was influenced by both in my decision making process.

The Dagon in Rise of Dagon is an elder dead god that is trying to return to the fantasy universe that The Chronicles of the Dead Sun takes place in.

I had designed a fair bit of the plot and back story for Dagon before I chose its name. I wanted Dagon to look really  creepy - and yes I am a big H.P. Lovecraft fan anyways so no shame on that I admit it: it influenced my mental imagery process. 

But once I settled on the general look I did some googling for old god names from our history and that's when I found the Mesopotamian Dagon ; and realized H.P. Lovecraft had simply borrowed from history also (I hadn't know that previously)!

What's possibly further interesting (and more unique) is Dagon is part of a duality god; the final conflict in the destruction of the previous Universe culminated in Dagon and the good god (unnamed at this point) merging in to each other in their final conflict the good god impaled their combined body with a god forged weapon creating a big-bang that seeded the new universe that my game takes place in.

That's all backstory that will probably never be told in-game but it is what helps inform my design about the game, its gods, and the game universes origins.

Thanks for asking!

We've also debated what the exterior style of the hotel should be. An idea was that the exterior was an unassuming cheesy old hotel on the side of the highway in the more mundane style of the 70s and the lobby / earlier levels would reflect that but as you get further up the hotel it gets more elaborate and of incongruous style/age. OTOH, we've also discussed going more Shining style with a big European looking mansion.

Project Update: I've been hacking away at some of the non-performance sensitive core gameplay code and moving it over into lua. While I'm a lot more comfortable in c# than I am in lua I can already see the gains from working in it. I've ditched a lot of the hard coded conventions that required enums and type checks and lua lends itself to data driven code really well. What the hell is with 'nil' and starting indices at 1 though?

Lua also simplifies the map editor, spell code, and item creation while being even more open to modding. Being able to write a quick function right in the map editor is nice. I know .net has the capability for similar fluidity but I'm not sure how Unity's mono would handle that. You could also probably approximate this kind of design with more aggressive inspector usage and prefabs in Unity but I just don't like how Unity serializes its own objects and the lack of nested prefabs is also a pisser. Plus the more you rely on Unity ootb features the harder it is to allow modding in Unity free.

Can you share more about this and its implementation? I've certainly heard of LUA but never thought to integrate it in Unity. Modding is something that I would like to do but this is my first RPG and I'm afraid to put too much on my plate and turn modding into a feature creep deathmarch that kills my project?

What your describing almost sounds like its helping you?

As promised after a week break I have returned with an update.

I was hoping to have been moved the previous week but unfortunately the place I was going to was not ready yet. So that is still at some point in the future for me.


One of the big things that happened was the Unity 5 beta 14 release.  I updated to this release and it made a gigantic difference on the look of the levels to the point where everything looked like it was made out of super-shiny metal!

So I had to refactor a lot of the shader settings and found that they had swapped the default Unity 5 material from 'specular' model to 'metallic' model.

I believe they also massively ramped up the specular levels of everything in general. So you'll find that the screenshots look different due to tweaks I made; however I can't say this is the final look & feel because I expect things to change again as the beta isn't over yet!


Unity 5 Beta aside I've been focusing on some polishing to the core game loop.

The core game loop is in .. in case I hadn't said that before!

So the core game loop being in is great but it was missing a little bit of polish that made some of those things not so easy to see to the player.  For instance if a player had died, the only way for you to know that previously was the red health bar looked 'empty'  , which it could also look pretty darn empty if you had only 1 health left for example.

So I now have a skull replace the player portrait when they are dead to let you actually know that particular character is dead.

Also there are now damage blood splashes on the character portraits, with the amount of damage you have received

Over the next week I plan to add more polishing bits as I mentioned above that provide feedback about what is going on to the player and improve the game play in general.

So now I'm going to be tightening the core game play loop and try to get game play to that really tight and fun spot that it needs to be at.  This is a really exciting point to be at for the project, but there's still lots of work to do that is not part of the core game loop.



So for the past two weeks we have the changelist:
first pass character portraits added to GUI
animated damage splash on character portraits
animated damage number indicator on character portraits
monsters now face player when attacking at all angles
migrated from legacy animation to mechanim system
added monster attack animations
added monster death animations
added monster miss animations
end game condition for party death added
skull portrait for dead character condition added
end game condition for party victory added
first pass end game menu added

Thanks for reading, see you next week.

One thing which strikes out to me is the pillar. Both because you designed it to do that (pretty neat idea I should say) but also because the texture resolution is the same as other objects. This might be a problem because the piller reaches close to the viewer and thus the texture density changes. The pillar is thus the one place a player can get a detailed look at the texture styling, which could break immersion (or I'm just over sensitive to that sort of thing).

Also I'm curious, what anti-aliasing are you using? There is definitely something being used. I'm just not sure if the blur is from image compression or if it is FXAA or SMAA.

Hi! This is still an early iteration, so we'll be sure to increase the pixel density of the upper pillars in later passes

The image might look antialiased bacuase on the forum it is scales, but if you click it you should open it full-sized, then you can see it is not AA at all. I'm not sure what antialiasing method Unity uses, but in the final game we'll just use whatever will be available.

Thanks! There is still more work left to do on the environment, we hope it will look much better when finished

Instead of increasing pixel density at the tops of the columns perhaps you could use a depth of field effect where the focus is at the ground plan and objects'too close' are a bit out of focus.  This would do two things - increase the realism through camera trickery and reduce texture memory needs by increasing the columns pixel density.

New enviros! New bloods! New screenshots!

Now with 100% more scripted events and puzzles!

Dude.. I'm loving this!  I liked it early on when you had the white with blood .. it provides a lot of great contrast (which I'm sure you know..) but this more advanced detailed environment retains that while adding tons of visual attraction and interest that really is vivid and engaging.  Absolutely keep this direction .. you are winning!

You forgot that demos are also useful to see if the game runs properly on your system (especially when it comes to PC). You don't want to spend money on something you can't use, unless you're feeling charitable (or you know you can change that situation soon).

If you care about accessibility, the demo can also be useful for people with some sort of disability to check if the game is playable for them (but make sure you include every setting present from the full version as well!).

Back in the 1980's this was a huge decider for me. Even the 90's remained valid.

I have not run in to this problem in the past 10 years though.. have you?


Otherwise though as a developer I'm not producing demos simply from the 'race to the bottom' sales atmosphere, the price of your game on steam is going to be less than a cup of coffee at starbucks before you know it.  The LOE / cost to produce a demo as a barrier to entry for a customer that's not willing to spend less than a cup of coffee just isn't worth it to me.

Also as noted by others; if I were to do anything resembling it would be a paywall for content activation.

Heck I'm even worried in The Rise of Dagon if I should release any alpha play test demos .. they would be simple demos like combat demos or opportunities for people to play with the level editor but I fear it would reduce sales because they would be using an alpha and see plenty of problems (duh!) and then go "oh well I tried it, so now I don't need to buy it when it comes out".

Updated the OP with the new trailer and all new screenshots but check it out here

and let me know of any suggestions.

Hey I just checked out the trailer.

Overall its pretty good and shows off a lot of features.

Some feedback:

- it is in general too long; I would break in to separate feature videos eventually especially as you close in on things being closer to final shape.

- there are some sound effects that sound a bit like 1980's arcade sounds in the video (bxfr used?) but they just seem out of place .. I assume those are placeholders; but if by any chance they are not definitely replace them they just break the mood.

- I like your use of light / shadows in general in the levels especially looming shadows for some of the monsters

- the exterior / logo sort of view at the end is very nicely done and polished ; but at least to my perception the exterior looks modern, but most of the interiors of the hotel appear to be period based (50's or 60's?) so they didn't match up.  However you may have plot that explains this (like going in a endless time warp though different ages of the hotel or something? )  If in fact it doesn't match and it all should be a peroid feel then I would go with a recommend of trying to update that shot to have something more appropriate to match your games look & feel

Thanks. I saw your devlog erebusman, hit me up if you wanna chat about the ups and downs of making dungeon crawlers sometime. Looks like we're tackling a lot of the same problems.

I've been pondering the combat and I decided to attack it from a different angle rather than implement auto combat options or group actions. Other attempts to modernize the classics like WL2 and Divinity have gone for an initiative turn based system where both player and enemy turns are mixed in together based upon their initiative score so it seemed like a good thing to try. So far the results seem much more dynamic:

Your combat is reminding me a little bit of Wizardy 8? And a little bit of the late Might and Magic series too.. although those were so bad I hate to use it as a comparison .. but theres just some similarities in general.

I like the riddle system stuff you are doing that's definitely a cool twist for a dungeon crawl style game!  Its nice to see alternate kind of game play puzzle/riddle solving things going on than just the trigger/switch stuff that Grimrock sticks to all the time for sure.

I have to apologize I would have responded sooner but I didn't get a notification on the response I need to check this thread more! 

It would definitely be cool to talk shop on what were doing like you said!  Were both using unity 5 and doing dungeon crawlers we have a lot in common project wise.

Hey Guys

Always nice to see a dungeon crawler project I really love them! I'm working on one myself The Rise of Dagon.

I wanted to give a bit of feedback ; in most of your videos you have a spotlight effect that looks a lot like a "flashlight" and it creates a anachronistic / incorrect feeling that doesn't fit in a dungeon?

Otherwise keep up the good work and good luck on the kickstarter!

NOTE: I apologize I forgot to cross post this this weekend as I've been busy packing up to move.  Please visit my blog to see the images this week!

http://punchypuncherton.blogspot.com/2014/11/rise-of-dagon-week-of-nov-15-2014.html

This week was a little low on productivity because Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition came out.

This was a really exciting development for me (and a lot of developers) so naturally I rushed out to download it the first night.

It ended up taking the full night to get installed and slowed my machine down a lot so I didn't get much done.

The next evening when I launched it said it was VS 2013 Express  .. which I though I had removed but I guess not?

So I had to remove that which took most of that evening, and then finally the next evening I reinstalled 2013 Community edition and now it is working properly.

So I thought I was set at that point but then I started experiencing Unity Editor crashes pretty frequently - which was not happening before.

So I swapped back to Monodevelop and the crashes are still happening.  So I started saving every 5 minutes .. which didn't work .. I actually had to make a change, quit Unity, and then load Unity to get anything to save.

Needless to say this was frustrating and very hard to be productive while this was going on.

In any case I persisted and got a few minor things done.

The first thing is I made some small improvements to my level loading code. I had previously implemented this loading with a fairly quick hack and found that it was not loading pillars that were not connected to walls so I went ahead and fixed that.

So the screenshot featured at the top shows a little section of room with freestanding pillars that I made to test that code fix.

Next up I was able to do a bit of work on some of the specular materials.. in Unity 5 beta I am using the new PBR default shader and I've found that something in the specular maps is causing some 'sparkly' artifacts to occur.

I was able to resolve this largely by going through the specular maps and using the Photoshop levels filter and make the whole thing darker by about 70%.

Then as needed in particular areas I did a select by color range and toned down other overly bright areas even further.

The takeaway I'm getting is that specular maps need to be much darker in general to look right in Unity 5 PBR mode!

Finally I was able to get some player targeting code done where I am able to find out which monster(s) are standing directly in front of the player so that when they press their default attack it will target whatever is in front of them.

This actually was tricky as I was using a physics collider box but it turns out (at least this is what I think) that I couldn't use the colliders when I a manually transforming the object around rather than letting physics do it.

I was able to figure this out eventually by reading the docs and swapped to a Physics.OverlapSphere as shown on the Unity docs and this did the trick!

So that was it for this week.

As an advance notice I am moving next Saturday so I will be skipping the update in favor of doing it the following week of Nov 29.

Thanks for reading, see you in two weeks!

This depends upon your reviewer.

Apple actually has a human being review your App before approval.  Sometimes they will actually contact you back and ask some questions, or let you know something has to be fixed before they will approve it.

You can certainly get past that screen by inputting a valid URL; however the reviewer may or may not pass it if they deem it to be a site that has actual support information.  As you are responsible for the support of your product, not Apple.

Hey Fuzzy,

Thanks for the heads up!  I have not run in to those yet.. but then again I'm not really relying on those things much ; and I do use a source control if anything went wrong!

I construct most of my game objects in code at runtime is probably why I haven't seen that is my guess.

How would you spot a corrupted item? Just looks wrong? Or has some form of glitch?

As mentioned last week I was in the middle of evaluating the viability of swapping the project over to Unity 5.0 beta but hadn't quite finished. The question was is: beta was stable enough to allow me to move the project over, or was there some sort of blocker or bug that would break the project?  At this point I've finished and feel satisfied I can go ahead and fully swap over to Unity 5 from this point forward as nothing severe enough to stop the migration was found.

This will make things much simpler as it has always been my goal to utilize the PBR (physically based rendering) approach for the materials.  Being able to cut over to the target approach as early as possible is very desirable as you can imagine.

Code-wise I was able to work on the first pass of path-finding for the monsters. They are now able to navigate through the dungeon on their own making turns down paths, or alternating routes as needed.

Video of monster pathing in action:




I was also able to get a first pass on line of sight check for the monsters which should enable me to have the monsters seek the player out once they see him.  So that's my goal for this next week!

I've also been working on some additional environment models and art , one of which shows up briefly in the video -- there is a portcullis gate that the skeleton walks through at the end of the video because I haven't put in the code for doors yet!

That's it for this week, see you next!