GreenSlimeGames

Hey there, been a nice and productive hour 🙂

Graphically, I’ve added a black background image, and added a texture to the plane at the back of the play field. I think this helps a lot in giving the impression you are actually in a crater 🙂

Most of the time was actually spent addressing a bug which had been annoying me for a while. When you fire the laser, and hits something, two objects are created, a light and a cube which deforms the terrain.  This is all good, but as I am running this in an Update() loop, it meant holding down the mouse for a second sometimes results into hundreds of items being created.  D’oh!  So after some reading, I discovered I could grab the number of objects of a certain type.  So by placing an if around the object creation section, it was very simple to cap the items.  The video shows you how to tag an object (which I will be uploading just after this).  The code used looks something like this :

var meltingObjects : int = GameObject.FindGameObjectsWithTag("meltingObject").Length;

if ( meltingObjects < 5 )
{
var MeltyCube = Instantiate ( MeltyCube , hit.point, transform.rotation );
var evilgreenglow = Instantiate ( evilgreenglow , hit.point, transform.rotation );
}

Pretty simple and incredibly helpful, now I can blast away at rock for hours without having to worry about a million item sitting there 🙂  Oh, which reminds me, I’ve also been playing around with creating the ore in bands, with some overlap, I forgot to show that in the video, so will just add a quick screenshot now :

It’s a rough model of the system I want, but gives you the idea of how I want the ores spread around the asteroid. In that screenshot they are floating 100 units above the terrain which is why it looks like they are out of the mine 🙂

One last thing, I’ve encoded with the ffdshow codec.  Hopefully you get a better frame rate now 🙂  Will start uploading the video now, tune in tomorrow for another hour 🙂

Edit : Youtube vid here : ( hopefully this one works! )

Very, very pleased with this hour. I now have a very cool looking green laser, which illuminates the area around it with green light. Also I’ve modified the FPSWalker script to account for my unique type of gravity ( not down, but to one side ) and improved the mole movement a lot.

The laser itself has four frames of animation, all set with the LineRenderer. Each frame of animation gradually increases the thickness of the beam, after it has reached frame 4, it reverses itself, which when played super fast, gives a really cool looking pulse effect. Pretty happy with that.

The lighting effect of the beam was pretty simple to do – I’m just spawning a light prefab at the end of the laser, which lives for a couple of frames before killing itself.

The other thing that I have played with is the movement, it feels much more natural now. I want to simulate the gravity a bit better, actually accelerating the mole as it falls, but as it stands I’m pretty happy as is. The upward movement is slow, which is intentional, at some point you will have some form of engine blowing fire out the bottom of the mole to make it look like a booster. I think that will look pretty cool 🙂

I just noticed as I was coming to the end of an hour that Unity have released a new version – Unity3. They couldn’t have waited till Saturday, damn them! 🙂 I’m making such progress with this game as is, I shan’t be upgrading yet. Learning as I go in timed challenge is pretty tricky as is … re-learning a new version could seriously impede my progress. So I will wait till after the 19 hours, and maybe reward myself with the indie version of Unity3 if I actually have a game written.

Well that is it for now folks, just going to record the YouTube vid and call it a night 🙂

Edit :



I noticed the mining laser didn’t show in its full glory, so have recorded a high speed version which I am just uploading now.

Edit 2 :