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VR Game Project – Day 3 of 8

Published by on December 25, 2016 | Leave a response
Adding a UV map in Blender

More progress, although not in the direction I was anticipating!

Bug Fixes and Improvements

The “blink” script continued to be problematic, so I removed the fancy one I grabbed from the Unity wiki and wrote my own very simple one. It works. I will release it CC-BY when I upload the source and build.

I did some “hallway testing” with family members. One of them had trouble getting out of the starting room because the door closed too fast after it opened. Instead of bumping up the delay, I did some hacking and came up with a context-sensitive “polite” door that refuses to close as long as you’re looking at it. Unrealistic? Maybe. Convenient for the game? Very much so! Like the “blink” script, I will release the door controller CC-BY later.

Last, the targets did not fully disable their collider when you teleported to them. I added some code that fixes this.

Lighting

Got lots more lighting done. I figured out my workflow…

  1. Create my models in Blender.
  2. Assign materials to vertices. I tried to keep the names straight so I wouldn’t end up with lots of duplicates (Unity reuses materials after it sees one for the first time, which is kinda nice) but I still ended up with a few typos and duplicate materials. Oh well, lesson learned.
  3. Create a UV map.
  4. In Unity, check the “Generate Lightmap UV” checkbox.
  5. Mark the mesh as static.
  6. Mark all my lights as “bake” vs “realtime”
  7. Disable realtime GI baking in the scene lightmap settings and just leave general GI baking enabled.
  8. Tweak the Baked GI resolution (40-60 seems good for testing; 128 looks reasonable for final builds)
  9. Check “Final Gather” for final builds.
  10. Bake!

Adding a UV map in Blender

Telling Unity to create lightmap UVs.

Skybox

It’s wasteful to use 6 huge images, but I did make a skybox using Unity’s skybox shader. I used Ingar’s space sky textures from Unvanquished for now. These are available CC-BY-SA 3.0 and I will make these files available when I realize a build and the source.

Furniture!

A table, a chair, a couch, a bed, a bedside table, two lamps, a computer monitor, a keyboard, a small desk, and a refined version of the curvy desk, all handcrafted with the finest non-GMO free range organic vertices by yours truly.

Screenshots

Here’s the fun bits!

In game screenshot. Office!

In game screenshot. Polite door won’t close until you look away. Just like Wheatley!

In game screenshot. Bedroom lighting.

In game screenshot. You have to find the password!

New version of the office, with fancy chairs.

Computer monitor.

General mesh outline. I don’t see me adding new areas in the time I have left in the challenge.

Adding computer monitors.

Second take on the appartment. New furniture!

Early take on some lighting.

Early build with bed.

Tomorrow’s work

  • Dialog system. No, really. I need this.
  • Possibly a cute little robot to sit in the chair. I don’t know. I’ve never successfully animated anything in Blender before.

VR Game Project – Day 2 of 8

Published by on December 24, 2016 | Leave a response
The light from the bulbs is going through the light fixture to shine on the ceiling.

Lots of progress today.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

Every so often, my “blink” mechanic was leading to a black screen with no “unblink”. I made some changes that I think have solved the issue. My script removed the targeted cube from the scene when teleporting to it, re-enabling it whenever the user teleported somewhere else. (So the user wouldn’t be standing on a cube.) I think that using setActive(false) on the cube was causing issues. So instead, I enabled/disabled the mesh renderer for that cube. Time will tell if this was the issue. It happened much more on my phone than it did on the PC.

I improved my door controller, adding a checkbox that allowed the door to switch between “toggle” mode and timed-wait mode, the latter of which causes the door to close again after a few seconds.

Audio!

I added sound effects for the door using the Google VR SDK tools. Many thinks to Pempi from the Freesound project for his awesome elevator sound. He says he actually broke into snuck into the mechanical penthouse of a building to record it! Whatever the source, I often use it for both elevators and (with some pitch/length alterations) doors.

Environment Modeling

I blocked in all the major areas where I want gameplay. There are three areas. The first is the long balcony. To the left is a small apartment complex (with one apartment that the player can enter). To the right is the main office for the apartment complex. The idea is that the player will first have to go to the apartment office to get the key to get into the apartment itself, after which point they can look for clues.

Early morning shot of the game environment.

Apartment hallway

Apartment Office

Detail Models

I made a few small detail models, including a desk and a light fixture. I’m planning on creating some couches, tables, bed, lamp, etc for the apartment.

Light Fixture

The desk. I’m super happy with the way it turned out!

Lighting

Ugh. Just, ugh. I was originally going to use Blender to bake lightmaps. However, the indirect lighting feature only supports “approximate” gathering, which makes for some interesting lighting bugs, like this one, where the light is going through the fixture itself:

The light from the bulbs is going through the light fixture to shine on the ceiling.

Strangely, there was a patch that enabled true raytracing for indirect lighting for Blender 2.6. I’m not sure why this was removed for Blender 2.7. I think it’d be very useful!

So, I decided to use Unity instead. I’m not exactly enthused with Unity’s lighting system either–I gather I’m not the only one–but it’s workable.

Here’s some screenshots.

Early take on the lighting on the balcony.

Actual lighting in Unity. Ignore the half-columns. I’m fixing those!

In-Game Screenshots

Early version of balcony, no lights.

Early version of office, no lights.

Balcony with pre-baked lightmaps in Unity.

Office with pre-baked lightmaps in Unity.

Future work

Tomorrow I plan to get a basic on-screen dialog system working, as well as creating some computer and switch props. I haven’t decided if I’m going to put people in the game. Maybe robots! Robots would be easier.

I also need to decide if I want to fight with Unity’s lightmapper more or try to pull off vertex lighting. I don’t think vertex lighting will work very well, but I might give it a shot.

Until tomorrow!

Hello 2015!

Published by on March 27, 2015 | Leave a response

So yeah, haven’t posted in awhile. Life has been crazy, awesome, and aggravating all simultaneously. (You know, like it always is, just more so.) So what’s been going on?

Here’s the cliff notes version. Expect sporadic blog posts in the future about these subjects.

  1. Upcoming Graduations: Holy Educational Achievement Get, Batman: I will graduate with my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science in May 2015. But what, you ask, what’s with the plural s? My mother is graduating too! She will be earning her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology this May. I’m so proud of her. She’s put up with all the stresses and pressures of college life, only in a sixty-something year old body instead of a twenty-something year old body. She came out on top anyway, because she’s awesome like that. Go mum!
  2. Prepping for Grad School: Because I like college too darn much. I’ll be attending CSUS in the Fall as a graduate student in Computer Science.
  3. Senior Project: Whenever I see a poorly-designed website or application, I snarkily call it a “Senior Project”. Is that derogatory to hard working seniors in CSC190 and CSC191? Yeah, but it pretty much sums up the Senior Project experience: chaotic and messy and all around annoying. And fun. (Sometimes.) Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very valuable course, but it’s also transcendentally irksome. (Sometimes.) Also, we’re learning like a year’s worth of stuff on the fly and stuffing it into a month or two, because we’re still learning how not to plan things. At least I have extra motivation to learn ASP.NET/C# and other cool things, like Selenium.
  4. Independent Study Project: Because why have one massive project to work on when you can have TWO? I’m working on a performance testing framework to do some performance analysis on virtual machines. The results of my project will be used to inform decisions on program contest judging systems.
  5. Supplemental Instruction (SI) Class: Two years ago, the campus gave me a classroom and a group of twelve nervous compsci students who wanted extra guidance in CSC20. By the end of the semester, my students owned the material like Horatio Caine owns bad puns. That’s apparently good enough for the campus, because it’s happened three more times. This is my fourth semester leading the CSC20W discussion section, and my first under the indomitable Dr. Krovetz. I have to step up my game to match him. Dr. Wang was cool, but Dr. Krovetz is the cool kid that all the cool kids want to be. I can’t just be competent any more. No. I have to be awesome. Like Batman. Batmaaaaaaaan. (Nananana nananana!)
  6. Teaching With Greenfoot: So Greenfoot is an awesome application for teaching the basics of Java programming and 2D game design to youngsters. But wait, you might say: Cody, you’re not that old–you’re only a few years ahead of most of your students! All right, okay, so I’m not that old; I’m in my 20s, but I’ve been doing the SI class long enough to where I call all of my students “youngsters” regardless of their age. However, in this case, I mean actual youngsters. Greenfoot is great for teaching kids how to program. It’s powerful enough (and complicated enough) to make fun programs, but it also offers instant feedback and scaffolds the boring parts of the program to bridge the gaps in a tween’s or teen’s attention span.
  7. Minecraft: I’m sorry. What is this “free time” thing you speak of? I faintly recall that I used to–no, never mind, tell me later; I have to go punch some trees. (I’m hoping to put my world map up on the blog eventually.)
  8. The Usual Horrible Abuse of Old Hardware: Actually, not so much. I barely used any duct tape this time! I had an old laptop with a Pentium P6000 CPU in it. It was so slow, it made baby kittens cry. (Okay, so it wasn’t that bad, but I wanted something better.) I gave it an i5 instead. And a SSD. And 8GB of RAM, because go big or go home.
  9. Hanging Out with Friends: So I’m generally okay at being social and just being part of a group (instead of teaching or leading it), but for some reason, I never really did it much before this semester. But now I have a group of close friends that I hang with on campus. We spend most of our time talking about Minecraft and making innuendo-laden remarks and listening to music and impersonating our professors’ voices and trying to dance and generally just goofing off. Yay for being a more emotionally healthy person!
  10. Working on my Driver’s License: Because who doesn’t want to strap themselves into a two-ton metal death projectile and go careening down the highway while dodging irritated drivers who think the speed limit is 85? I’m aiming to get my license by July.

So yeah, that just about covers it. If you’re looking for more sarcasm, go watch Minute Minecraft Parodies. And expect more posts from me in the near future.

-C