Matt Downey @SciFiGameDev@mastodon.gamedev.place

Finished my 6-second game trailer for my Asteroids (1979)-clone in virtual reality:

https://youtu.be/tGoc2T6ABUc

One of the coolest parts is audio (which can come from any point on the draped cloth, which means sound can be spatialized all around the player).

There's also some cool choices for whether head movement moves the camera (I'll see how disorienting it is first).

It would be pretty cool to port 2D games into full virtual reality (without it being like a virtual flatscreen display).

In abstract all you need is a RenderTexture and a special mesh. It's sort of like taking a flexible display and draping it over a globe:

https://previews.123rf.com/images/versusstudio/versusstudio1409/versusstudio140900081/31594387-cloth-covered-sphere-on-white-background-3d-render-illustration.jpg

I guess if my current Master's program is much worse quality than my last Bachelor's program, then I should drop out (and I'll figure out my next university later). If I had neutral learning outcomes I might continue for the piece of paper (degree), but any time your university is worse than books and the internet, you know it's bad.

Knowing my personality, I'm probably not gonna be able to ask my three references to resubmit their letter of recommendation, but I'll cross that bridge later.

The amount of drastic, structural changes to my project for the sake of optimization is interesting.

There are some changes that may obfuscate intent (at least in the short-term), but I have been surprised at how some concepts make my code more succinct.

It's hard to make application programming interfaces (APIs), though, and I am absolutely dreading when I get my first user that isn't me (because that means I have to maintain backwards compatibility DX ).

I didn't realize trying to make Super Mario Bros 1-1 in (2D) virtual reality was sacrilege as of 2 years ago: https://www.destructoid.com/miyamoto-says-mario-not-fit-for-virtual-reality-385531.phtml

I'm still doing it of course (generically), but I need to get my collision system working for approximately the fourth time (on approximately the seventh iteration/prototype).

And the solution only took <2 hours XD

This was so dumb, but interesting nonetheless.

I checked my code and can now confirm this XD

Oh... wait, no the problem is definitely that I'm stupid.

The one part of my game's movement that is working is custom code, the rest of it is just never getting synchronized (almost certain here).

I have been stuck on the same problem for two weeks, and it's (more or less) the only thing I need to do to release my game =/

Wait, so 1) I didn't realize packages had documentation (they never came up in discussions or searches) - https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@0.0/api/Unity.Transforms.html and 2) the packages are not available in my project despite all of the includes, assembly dependencies (and subdependencies), etc.

It has really been throwing me off how I can occasionally see ComponentData structs but not their wrapper classes =s

If AttachComponent sorts the Entity list so that parents always come before their children, then doing this manually wouldn't be so bad I guess - although I'm pretty sure it doesn't because that would break user links/references. (Regardless, I don't want to reinvent the wheel if possible.)

Anyone know how to use something like LocalRotation for an Entity? I would like to avoid reprogramming parent/child transformation hierarchies if possible.

I could have sworn there was an old entities hierarchy example project (which I would settle for) but I can't find that either.

Ahhhhhhh, Unity supports vector graphics!

https://youtu.be/BAyd5wSPQrM

This is the most pleasant surprise Unity feature. I somehow never knew 1) they were working on this 2) it's already released.

Thanks to the Unity team!

A video of my 2D virtual reality Earth visualization experience, "The Earth Is 'Round" (Global Game Jam 2019):

https://youtu.be/Ib8g2Cy7D2o

Done with my 2D virtual reality "Earth's surface if you were looking at it from the core of the planet" toy for Global Game Jam:

https://globalgamejam.org/2019/games/world-round

Are there any reliable ways to get (entry-level) software developer jobs?

I absolutely love throwaway prototyping. I can't wait to get rid of all of my collision code and reprogram it via data-oriented design.

I might end up coding everything (with no dependencies on Unity collisions), which would be pretty cool.

Actually, another useful thing to know is [RequireSubtractiveComponentAttribute] (and [RequireComponentTagAttribute]).

Nice, finally found it. It's called SubtractiveComponent<T>.

Anyone know if there's a straightforward way to run a system if and only if a tag doesn't exist on an entity?

I want the underlying system to have different behavior based on the presence of a single tag.