Older worklog entries. 12/10No longer only flat ground! added hills, so now the train moves along and does jumps. I've determined that due to the way I'm generating meshes, it will be hard to make the uvs correct, so I think I'm going to ditch the texture for now, and come back to making the ground look decent later, since there are higher priority things to work on.
I also added a scrolling background, I just quickly animated it using unity's animation tool, at some point I should come back and have scroll relative to the trains speed.
The seams turned out not to be a big problem, I just needed to tweak the physics settings a bit to make it so that the train wouldn't freak out when going over one.
TODO:
Work on the level generator some more. Although it is now generating geometry, I now need to work on making it generate interesting track.
Start work on the procedural background generator, which I'm assuming will be an absolute bitch.
12/09The level is now procedurally generated, flat, and will go on for infinity. It also handles the train going at high speeds, which is important. However, due to the method I used, I get a seam in the ground( which you can see in the screenshot ), whenever I stick a new piece in. I had a problem with floating point errors sticking a small gap in between the pieces when I stick one in front of the other, which would cause the train to jump up in the air occasionally due to physics. The CORRECT way to fix this would not be to use track pieces at all, and to add and delete verts as the train moves, but that would complicate the scripting, so I'll see if I can find another way to get the pieces together without a seam.
I also added uv coords to the track pieces, so they now have stroms grass texture. Pretty sure I fucked that up, so I'll have to look into that tomorrow.
TODO:
Look into seam problem
Unfuck generated tracks pieces uvs
Generate pieces for slopes
Cap the trains top speed, since after 1 minute it is literally going at ludicrous speed into warp
Start on procedurally generating the background using +peters 3d tiles
12/08 A boring update.
Started on the procedural level generation, which meant I had to learn how to proceduraly make meshes in script, in Unity. Which isn't too bad, similar to opengl, but typing in the vertex coords and triangle list for 24 verts( to make a cube ), was a major pain, and took a while to get everything correct( kept screwing up the windings... ).
Fortunately, making the mesh work as a collider was as easy as assigning it to a variable in the MeshCollider attached to the gameObject, which was nice.
For the procedural level generation, my intention is to connect it with a gameplay director, similar to Left 4 Dead, and have it pump out nice, easy, flat track, when it feels the player is getting too overwhelmed, and rollercoastery track when it feels things need to be more exciting.
TODO FOR TOMORROW:
Figure out how to assign a toony material to the track so that it isn't completely black.
Generate infinite pieces of flat track.
Older worklog entries.
12/07A bit more detailed description of what I have in mind for the game - A 2.5D train shooter, where the train goes really fast, and has turrets attached to each of the cars. The turrets are used to shoot things, what things I don't know yet
Tonight I started working on the train physics first, since they were what I was most worried about. I did a quick rough and ready camera script, then got to work on the train. Even though it was my first time using hinges in unity, it was pretty easy, and I finished getting a prototype going in about an hour( less than the 3 I expected ). The only real issue right now is that the train physics only look decent as I don't apply too much force to the locomotive, if I do, its ass lifts into the air.
TODO FOR TOMORROW -
Get a prototype going of a procedural level geometry generator going, since I don't have time for doing tons of long levels by hand. Also I should make the camera less rough and ready.
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