Steve's Blog

June 30, 2020 Fundamentals of Movement in Unity All Basic Options Move in Unity3D - Ultimate Unity Tutorial Youtube - Link By: Jason Weimann Introduction This video stuck out to me because it always takes me a bit of time to setup even basic movement at the beginning of a small Unity project because there are just so many different approaches that will result in movement, but I always want to try and figure out the optimal solution. Jason Weimann is a great source for covering Unity basics, so this new tutorial looked like a good way to really nail down all the different basic movement options in Unity and really get a strong understanding of when to use different types of movement for different projects and why.

June 24, 2020 Architecture AI Project Completed Project Prototype Introduction We were exploring different methods for importing architectural models into Unity and decided to try Revit to see what it had to offer. The models are easy to move between softwares, and it also creates .cs scripts that Unity can use to provide some interactive data visualization when using the Revit models. Data Visualization Options I moved everything dealing with the major logic of the A* grid node visualization into its own class named AStarGridVisualization. This allowed me to continue to hold on to all the different debug visualization methods I created over the course of the project and convert them into a list of options for the designer to use for visualization purposes. As can be seen in the demo, there is a list of options in the drop down list in the Unity Inspector so the designer can tell the system which data to visualize from the nodes. The options currently available are: Wa...

June 15, 2020 Architecture AI Project Revit Models in Unity Introduction We were exploring different methods for importing architectural models into Unity and decided to try Revit to see what it had to offer. The models are easy to move between softwares, and it also creates .cs scripts that Unity can use to provide some interactive data visualization when using the Revit models. Parameters Import Script This script creates a large list of strings. It does so by receiving an identification looking string, and uses a method to convert that string into its corresponding parameter information. Example: private string ParamByName(string d) { switch(d) { case "Generic_-_12\"_[354721]": d = "Area : 8100 ft2 \nElevation at Bottom : -1 ft \nElevation at Top : 0 ft \nType Name : Generic - 12\" \n"; break; ... } return d; } Parameter Mouse Over Script This script uses the name of this.gameObject to add information to t...

June 11, 2020 AI For Beginners Goal Orientated Action Planning (GOAP) Parts 4, 5, and 6 Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses Unity Learn Course - AI For Beginners Intro This part of the course gets into actually programming the GOAP system and using it within their example Unity project. These tutorials focused on setting up the foundational classes: GAgent, GAction, GWorld, and WorldStates. These are used as the core of the system as they either hold all the information to pass around through the system, or serve as the base classes to work with for creating agents within the system. The World States The World States The main scripts created here are: GAgent GAction GWorld WorldStates WorldStates: They added another class within this script named WorldState. This WorldState class just holds a string named key, and an int named value. These will be used for a dictionary setup, hence the key and value naming setup. The rest of the WorldStates class i...

June 10, 2020 AI For Beginners Goal Orientated Action Planning (GOAP) Parts 1, 2, and 3 Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses Unity Learn Course - AI For Beginners Intro This course covers goal orientated action planning (GOAP) as another way to set up flexible systems of AI behavior. This blog covers the first 3 tutorials of the course which introduce the general GOAP concept by defining its parts and explaining the planning process going in to creating a GOAP system. An Introduction to GOAP GOAP Introduction Goal Orientated Action Planning (GOAP): has all the elements of a finite state machine, but uses them differently uses graphs for processing GOAPs actions and goals are decoupled actions are free elements in the system that are mixed/matched to meet goals instead of having a list of actions needed to meet a goal, GOAP allows for multiple solutions to be chosen from Actions Components: Precondition, Effect Precondition: state that must be met...

Architecture AI Reading CSV File Data to Use in Node Grid June 8, 2020 Architecture AI Project Read CSV File General Goal For this architecture project we wanted to be able to read data exported from other softwares into Unity. Initially we will be using data from Rhino, but it will be converted to a very generic format (like .csv), so it should be more widely applicable. This data will be used as another way to inform the node system and assign architectural values to these nodes which will again be used to inform the decisions of the agents traveling with the node system. Using Text Data in Unity Our text files will be very simplistic, so we can use a very straight forward approach to organizing and using the data from the text files. Each line of data is important for a single node, so splitting on a line will help organize individual node information. Then we just have to split up the information within that line to spread the information out to the proper variables wi...