Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Building Blocks

The Oomph Kit is out the door at v1.0 for anybody to use and learn from for free, so far response has been mild so it doesn't look like I need to shovel time into updating it which means I can move along with other things.

So what's next?

The Oomph Kit actually started as a Hovercraft segment of Brevis and spun off a huge pile of learning I had to do with physics, vectors, directions, rotations, transforms, quaternions, mass, torque, force, velocity and accelerations. It was at that point I realized what everyone really meant when they said to start small - there are things you simply do not 'just whip up and figure out' and you have to either sit down and study them, cut them from your plan, or suffice to implement a cheap corner-cutting alternative. In this case, I sat down to figure it out and quit working on Brevis. I can only imagine how blown away I would have been if I had scoped out a more complicated project. The Oomph Kit actually was trimmed down as well, I had originally planned to include several more cool functions but ended up deciding that people would probably just want to butcher the system to cater to their needs, so I just left them out. You'll see those functions in some videos later.

But wow did I learn a lot. I don't know how I got along before, and even at this point of publishing the kit I have to stop myself from rebuilding the whole thing more efficiently (again). I'm really glad I did spend the time to spin off and make a project just for the sake of learning physics in Unity. Now that I've got a better understanding (certainly not complete) of that I think I'm going to move back to working on Brevis.

This week I started getting back to conceptualizing characters and started modeling the protagonist. It felt really good to get back into ZBrush and carve up some shapes, for me its so much more enjoyable than doing hard surface objects in max. At this point I've lined out a basic scope for the first level and I plan to build everything to prototype that level before getting any further into the scope and/or design. I'll also be getting into some areas that I haven't touched yet, like Mecanim, Character Animations import/exporting, Character Rigging (Max), AI design, custscenes and so forth.

Speaking of AI... That is one of my next objectives to nail down! As we'll be in space flying around I need some AI baddies to dogfight with you and they need to be slightly more intelligent than the asteroids you're avoiding. I had some ideas on how to make it work but I really need some input from more knowledgeable people. Doing physics based flight was kinda hard to get feedback on and answers for and AI is way more niche than that and all of the threads I'm able to find online are extremely vague, to the point of frustration.

I've found some good documents online that have got me started.
Steering Behaviors (1)Steering Behaviors (2)F.E.A.R AI DesignUnity Answers Flight AI

That is my primary focus when I'm not doing the character models at this point, and I think it will end up being a pretty hard cookie to tackle for me. Feel free to send me any info or help that might be relevant.

Look for some videos or images coming soon on the character model progress and likely some blog posts on the AI systems being worked on.



Early pics of the protagonist for Brevis...




Friday, November 1, 2013

Released Oomph Kit 1.0 project files

You can download the Oomph Space Kit Project for free, follow the link through one of these forum threads.

Unity Forums
Playmaker Forums



Enjoy!

Post up if you have any comments or troubles using it.