Tag: game development

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Construction controls update

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve made a couple of changes to the controls:-

  • After parts have been attached together, you can now cycle their attachments between available types (e.g. rigid or hinge), by hovering over attachments and pressing E.
  • Cloning and deleting entire constructions is now done via a separate menu (accessed by holding Shift + Q).

More rendering improvements and other fixes

Also now in the build:-

  • A load more rendering improvements following on from the previous overhaul.  The main difference being that the sky and distant water are now rendered before everything else, using another separate camera with a much larger far clip distance.  This prevents the horizon line from being clipped out.
  • Time-of-Day upgrade.
  • Reference grid in inventory part preview images.
  • Force zones now slow down objects at world boundaries.
  • A bunch of bug fixes.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Playable build – updated

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Playable build – updated

Rendering overhaul

In Unity, full-screen image effects, such as screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), bloom and tone-mapping, can only be applied after everything else has rendered.  You can optionally flag image effects to render between opaque and transparent stuff, but that doesn’t help me because image effects wipe the stencil buffer, which I need for object highlighting.

Previously there were many things about the rendering order in the game that were just plain wrong.  For example, SSAO was being applied after water and atmosphere / fog, and 3D UI elements were being bloomed and tone-mapped.  Ideally you want to be able to interleave image effects and other rendering at will.  The only way to do this in Unity is to use multiple cameras (with only the first one clearing the screen, the rest rendering on top).  Here is how I have things set up now to achieve the correct rendering order:-

Camera 1

  1. Clear screen.
  2. Render opaque objects (e.g. terrain and other solid objects).
  3. Render object highlighter mask texture using stencil values written by object shaders.  This has to be done before any image effects, as they wipe the stencil values.
  4. Render SSAO full-screen image effect.
  5. Render atmosphere / fog as a full-screen image effect.

Camera 2

  1. Render transparent objects (e.g. water), these apply atmosphere / fog in their shaders.
  2. Render object highlighter full-screen image effect, using mask rendered earlier.
  3. Render sun shafts, bloom and tone-mapping image effects.

Camera 3

  1. Clear depth only.
  2. Render 3D UI elements.
  3. Render 2D UI / menus etc.
  4. Render anti-aliasing full-screen image effect.

Unfortunately, using multiple cameras like this exposes some long standing bugs in Unity which really screwed me up for a while.  Luckily there are known workarounds for these, for more info you can check out these threads:-

Ambient occlusion

I’ve also fixed some issues with SSAO that were causing black speckly artifacts to show on the distant terrain.  Now that SSAO looks much nicer, I’ve enabled it by default.  I’ve also fixed a bunch of other bugs and issues!

Playable build – updated

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Playable build – updated

Over the last week I’ve mostly been working on project planning stuff, but I did make a few minor tweaks to the build.  Now the graphics and sound settings get saved and re-loaded.  There’s also an option to enable vsync, and when creating a new “sandbox mode” game, you can set some basic time-of-day settings.

Next week, more project planning.  Wanna get this out of the way so I can get back to designing & coding!

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Alignment indicators

When aligning a selected part to another (frozen) part, prior to attachment, the game now shows where the available attachment points are.  These indicators reflect the type of attachment, either “surface” (e.g. as in block to block) or “interior” (e.g. as in block to axle).  The idea is that this should make it easier to accurately position parts where you want them.

Other stuff

In order to implement the alignment indicators I had to refactor a bunch of code, one side effect of which was that I was able to slightly reduce the per-rigidbody network data by calculating more stuff on the client side.  I also fixed a bug in explore mode, that was causing parts to not spawn.

Playable build – updated

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Playable build – updated

Attachments

Previously, when attaching parts together with a hinge, the game would attempt to remove any rigid attachments that would prevent these parts from rotating with respect to one another.  Now that you can go in and delete individual attachments after the fact, I’ve removed this behaviour as it was somewhat arbitrary.  At this point I think it’s better to leave it up to the player to decide which attachments to delete.

In conjunction with this, any hinges whose connected parts can’t rotate (due to being also rigidly attached in some way) are now highlighted red.  This will hopefully help you debug stuff in your constructions that isn’t rotating as you want it to.

Physics collisions

Up ‘til now, subsections of constructions that were directly attached together with a hinge would not collide with each other.  As of Unity 4.5, the PhysX flag that enables these collisions has been exposed, so I’ve now enabled it in game.  No more parts passing through each other, woop!

Playable build – updated controls

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Playable build – updated controls

Deleting attachments

Over the last week I’ve made a couple of changes to the way parts can be detached from one another.  Firstly, when you right-click a part, all attachments connecting that part are now deleted (not just hinges only or rigid only).  Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, attachments can now be deleted individually.  This is done by hovering your cursor over the attachment to highlight it, and then right-clicking it.  For example this allows you to detach and re-position an entire sub-section of your construction by deleting only those attachments that are connecting it.  Remember though, stuff will stay attached together until all attachments connecting them have been severed.

Hopefully these changes will make it easier to modify your constructions, re-position things, and so on.  The plan is, in addition to deleting, you’ll soon be able to make modifications to highlighted attachments.  Hopefully I’ll have this done in the next week or so!

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New time-of-day / sky system in game

I felt like I needed a change after being bogged down with the construction mechanic and physics issues for so long, so I decided to do some rendering stuff over the last week or so.  As of the latest build, I have integrated Mod Monkeys’ fantastic Time of Day system (available on the Unity asset store: http://u3d.as/4fg) into the game.  It implements atmospheric scattering, dynamic time-of-day, clouds, weather etc. and is really nicely done, a quality asset.  It wasn’t quite a straight drop in for me, as I had to apply the scattering to my terrain shaders and make a couple of minor mods, but overall it was very easy to integrate.  So far I have the time of day changing as you play, but the weather doesn’t do anything yet, I’ll have to look at hooking that up later.

Next up for me is back to the construction mechanic.  Still no word on that Unity collision bug…

Non-collision bug update

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I’ve been away on vacation for a couple of weeks, but after getting back I’ve been looking further into that non-collision bug. After some further investigation, it turned out that not only was my “on collision stay” callback not being called, but collisions between the parts were not happening altogether. I also managed to reproduce the issue in the editor as well as standalone / web-player builds.

I haven’t found a work around yet (not sure if I even can), but I put together a special cut down version of my game project and sent it off to Unity to help them reproduce the bug. In the meantime, the game is still broken unfortunately, the only way to get around the issue is by removing and re-adding parts to your construction until Unity physics corrects itself. I hope the Unity devs can fix this issue soon, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see!