The Unity Problem

I've discussed in the past my fears concerning Unity and how difficult it would be to use. Those fears were mostly quelled thanks to a one on one meeting with Aline a couple of weeks back. Though one or two were also substantiated.

Aline sat down with me and helped me build a basic framework for a character walking around a scene and a movable camera that I would theoretically be able to expand to incorporate my simulation. Unfortunately, we hit trouble when Aline tried to help me port the program back to my computer. Luckily, she was able to get it up and running on my PC, and while I'm still not entirely sure I understood how she set up some of the more complex animations, I believe she taught me enough about how the program works that I could start moving the code over without any major catastrophes. If you are reading this, Aline, thank you so much for the foothold into Unity. It's given me a lot of confidence about the graphics side of things, and I'm sure will be invaluable going forward.

I've started shaping up my code to work with how the Unity simulation works, in preparation for porting it over. Characters no longer look for other free characters to start interactions with, but wander from (x,y) location to (x,y) location, randomly generated on a predefined grid (room, playing field, whatever you want to call it - this will be defined in the world .txt file starting soon). When a player takes a turn to look for a free interaction partner, they check only with the character closest to them. If the character is busy, they continue to wander. If not, they stop and talk. Once they reach a selected point, a new one is generated for them to wander to. I chose this wandering implementation to coincide with the Unity file I set up with Aline, where a character needs a set point to walk to passed into it.

At some point I'm going to have to address user functionality. It's looking like, if I work over my vacation, I might be able to enter next semester having a very basic "story generator" implemented using Unity. If that's the case, based on a conversation I had with Norm and Aline at the "Beta" review, I might shift gears and try to actually apply this generator to something by implementing a Unity based mini-game, something like a detective story where the murder/murderer/circumstances are different every time.