Despite the recent lack of updates and the topic of the last post, I have been working fastidiously on the ol' Rustbotteroo. First, a screenshot (followed by wall of text after the break)!
Here you can see a small campfire flanked by a few robots. There were four, but I disassembled one and started re-joining a bunch of its pieces into some abstract sculpture, just for fun. Also, the wrench (placeholder art, if not obvious, like everything else) is new in this build, and is the tool used for grabbing parts off of NPCs.
You can see I've also added some placeholder music for setting the mood from the text in the lower left-hand corner. When this screenshot was taken, it was playing some Darkhalo, a longtime favorite artist of mine.
Anyways, nothing functionally has really changed recently. Lately I've been fiddling with Blender3d and incorporating some environmental clutter into the scenery. I was really shocked by how easy the integration is. I'd expected to have to export from Blender into some proprietary format, then use some conversion tool to get another format that Unity can read, followed by some import process within Unity and subsequently lots of tweaking within Unity to get things right.
That's not the case at all.
All that's required is to save your Blender files within your Unity project's Assets directory, and Unity automatically reads and imports the save file on its own for some rather seamless integration.
Mind = blown.
Based on this, I tried making some armatures in Blender and some animations to go along with them, and import them into Unity. This is the only area where I'm struggling so far, because I can't seem to get the rig avatar mapping to stick. Additionally, I need to figure out how to get my robots (which are piecemeal compositions of Unity primitives) to follow the animations once I do get the mapping to work.
But I think that's getting ahead of myself. As fun as it is to start fiddling with that sort of thing, I think I should be concentrating on core mechanics some more. Sure, thus far I've got object conjoining down, but they're just static solid strucutres - not very interesting. You can build statues or stairs, but other than that there's not much of interest (actually I did build a domicile but that's still not all too impressive).
To add some spark to this, I need to start working on different ways to make these structures more useful. To do this, we add movement to them! So is unveiled the need for hinges, springs and pistons. With these, any manner of contraption can be made and therefore will make things all the more appealing. While hinges and springs are inherent members of Unity, however, pistons are not and would require some homebrew concoction programming. All I need is a cylinder within a cylinder and a sine function attached, and voilà! Makeshift piston that (hopefully) will behave as I dictate.
Pursuant to this I'll likely work on an inventory system, so that the player can carry multiple items with him instead of relying on them being nearby (or, worse, having to travel back and forth between what's being built and where the pieces have fallen on the ground).
Well, that's enough for me to focus on for now. Will report more later, hopefully with some results!
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