Steve's Blog

July 29, 2019 Unity Composition Composition vs Inheritance Youtube - Unity Architecture - Composition or Inheritance? By: Unity3d College I was looking to use inheritance with an overall parent abstract class to create a few simple scripts, but was having some trouble getting it setup properly. When looking into how to approach this better, I came across the concept of "Composition vs Inheritance". This is the first time I heard the word composition, but it appeared to be the idea in Unity of creating a bunch of small scripts that perform specific types of functions that can be placed on objects in a varied structure style to create the proper type of object you want. I thought this was a neat concept that made a lot of sense in Unity, so I ended up using this idea to approach the issue I was working on. This got me into using RequireComponent(typeof) in Unity, which I'd seen before but never really used. This seemed to be a nice feature to keep track of ...

July 19, 2019 Updating Waypoint System Starting with a base waypoint system I created with the Brackeys tower defense tutorial, I wanted to update it so that the overall path could be altered at run time. Basically, I didn't want objects traveling along the waypoints to travel the full length everytime. I needed them to sometimes travel part way, sometimes more/less, sometimes the full way. I decided I would have the main script holding the general waypoint information to hold the value for where objects should stop traveling. This way all objects could reference this for how far they should travel, and I could have anything else just change this single value to update where everything is going. This was as simple as adding an int value called currentEnd to this main script, Waypoints. Then I added the methods GetCurrentEnd (to return currentEnd) and SetCurrentEnd (to change the currentEnd value). Next was updating the Waypoint_Movement script, which is attached to...

July 8, 2019 Password Managers LifeHacker - Lifehacker Faceoff: The Best Password Managers, Compared By: Thorin Klosowski KeePass Homepage Youtube - KeePass Tutorial 2017 By: Papercut As someone that works a lot with computers, it's been way too long for me to not look into password management to keep everything secure. I happened to come across the top article from LifeHacker here today and decided to finally look into setting something up. Using that as my starting point, KeePass looked like a cool option since it was free and open source. KeePass seems pretty cool, but being open source it also wasn't as user friendly as some of those other options, so I looked into some basic tutorials for getting it setup. The one I found above was very straight forward and it ended up being much easier to get KeePass basically setup than I thought it would. While KeePass was pretty easy to setup its basic capabilities, there are some things I still need to look int...

July 3, 2019 Creating Basic FPS Camera Controller FPS Controller in Unity Youtube - How to construct a simple First Person Controller with Camera Mouse Look in Unity 5 By: Holistic3d This first tutorial is a good example for setting up the most basic type of first person camera in Unity. Since the project I was using didn't need a character at all and I was just attaching this directly to the camera, I needed to make some slight modifications to have it setup properly. This is because I didn't have a parent object to apply the second type of rotation to. This just required me to set both rotations in both directions at the same time (since setting one and then the other to the exact same object had the second rotation constantly overriding the first). This camera had a slight issue though where it moved relative to wherever the mouse starts on the screen. While I was just creating this camera controller for debugging purposes for an AR project, this would be an is...

July 3, 2019 Outline Shader Tutorial in Unity Youtube - Shader - Smooth Outline - [Tutorial][C#] By: N3K EN As someone with very minimal shader experience in Unity still, this step by step tutorial is nice for just getting a feel for how shader code is setup while also creating a useful effect for certain art styles or attention drawing practices. It simply creates an outline around 3D objects of various color with variable width.