Recap - Week of January 13 to January 20

January 20, 2019

Recap - Week of January 13 to January 20

Thesis Work

Continue to search for some research on the general term of “game mechanics” to solidify the use of its definition as well as determine the components that make for interesting variable mechanics.

Terminology to Look Into – Programming

Structs

Structs were a big part of the field of vision tutorials, and I still don’t fully understand how to utilize them. They are structured data containers that can hold many types of variables to use over and over, but I’m not sure if there’s more to them to help utilize them, especially for games. Could help to look into a tutorial where there are characters or enemies with stats (i.e. RPGs), or a pokemon-like tutorial (well, also under RPG).

Field of Vision Recap

Youtube - Field of view visualisation (E03: stencil shader)
By: Sebastian Lague

To start, I just wanted to include that there is a 3rd part to this tutorial series I would like to get to. The field of view (FoV) tutorial was really useful for learning several aspects of Unity programming overall. I learned more about creating Editor elements for making your scripts into more designer friendly tools. I was still getting some weird interactions with the GetAxisRaw command I need to look into. This was also a nice refresher on generating meshes within script, but the extra twist of tying it in with raycasts was something interesting, new and useful.

Learning Foundations of Unity Shaders

My Blog - Learning Foundations of Unity Shaders

This was my first time learning about shaders and getting into the Shader Language and scripting anything, so I was introduced to a lot of new concepts and terminology. I covered it pretty extensively in the blog post, so I just relinked it here. These tutorials made by Unity in several steps are usually very informative conceptually as well as programmatically.

Quadtree and Octree

These data structures for use in games seem like they could be very useful for some things I am interested in since they seem like they can be pretty computationally beneficial if you want to have wide reaching field forces interacting between many different objects. I will still need to do more research into this, as well as find more tutorials as they were hard to find.

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